Diesel and Marni Show How to Look Original

One of the tests of a great fashion brand is how its clothes look off the runway, on regular people — not celebrities paid to wear the clothes, or models styled in the clothes, but fans who most likely put their money where their taste was, bought a piece, and wear it as they want.

So it was instructive that before the Diesel show on Wednesday a host of otherwise anonymous attendees in various versions of designer Glenn Martens’ shredded, lasered and otherwise altered denim were wandering around the cavernous show space taking selfies and looking not just cool or confident (though they did look that), but original.

It’s a bit of alchemy, being able to transform the familiar into an unexpected object of desire; to make you see something that you think you know in a new light. That’s the promise of fashion. And at a time when a lot of the everyday has turned unrecognizable in an alienating way, it’s nice to be reminded that such an experience can actually be a beautiful, even revelatory, thing.

So far it’s happened twice in Milan. Both at Diesel, where after the selfie-taking had been satisfied, the lights went up on an entirely inventive, irreverent view of not just the basics, but the classics, and at Marni, where Francesco Risso held his show amid 75 bistro tables, around which he riffed on the building blocks of wardrobe.

That both brands are part of Renzo Rosso’s Only The Brave group may be a coincidence, but may also be a reflection of what happens when designers are allowed to start taking risks, when they let their imaginations go.