Doel fuelled by Diesel
Last year we announced our collaboration with Diesel for the third time. A collaboration that has been evolving since 2023, first supporting our physical poster campaign, then we installed a fake storefront, as if a Diesel store had always been in Doel, equally taken over by the surrounding foliage and ruined, touched by time. In 2024, we took it further and transported the brand to our second largest stage, the Haven, for a new symbiosis.
The Haven stage is imagined as an open air club space, where you can see its evolution from year one to year three in our previous journal entry. With Diesel in the support role, we found the freedom to rethink and rebuild this space from the ground up, while retaining its key feature: dance platforms.
The biggest change was to place the deejay in the middle, center stage, and pulling the crowd in with the artist, by cutting off the corners of the podium and offering these square meters back to the dancers. The scaffolding now functionally serving as dance poles and the artists and dancers are brought to the same height, equalising their relation again, as well as amplifying their in-the-moment-connection, most notable during Miss Bashful & DBBD’s live performance.
The columns to hold the blackened roof still stand in one half of the structure, serving as the entrances and exits to the stage, while the other half was pushed back against the empty gardens of a row of abandoned houses, and to the side wall of a second row of houses, providing the typical Doel style brick background. With these changes, we also felt a new lighting plan was due. A more subtle approach, a bit more random, less defined and more atmospheric. Stan Vrebos was invited to take a look and also to design Diesel’s stage presence.
When thinking about a brand presence in the context of Doel Festival, a festival that resides in the streets of a village, an urban environment and a decayed one at that, we thought how do bigger brands physically present themselves elsewhere, before translating that medium to Doel, and that was large scale signage. We then asked designer Stan Vrebos to build us what was basically a billboard, a billboard that in this case would carry a sneak peak of Diesel’s then latest collection yet to be revealed. A Doel Festival first.
Subsequently, we needed a logo presence inside the stage and instead of muffling the logo away we did the opposite, hang it above the heads of the artists, trusting that if it was done right, it would look good regardless of it being a brand logo.
With that, our arena, our haven for dancing, had taken its newest form. Carrying the same mischievous energy, with enough room, freedom, for exuberant movement. Fuelled by Diesel.
Founded by Renzo Rosso in 1978 and rooted in denim mastery, Diesel evolved into being a leader in fashion, now a true alternative to the established luxury market. Since 2020, Diesel’s collections are overseen by Belgian born creative director Glenn Martens, who graduated from Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts. With Martens digging into the brand’s pop culture heritage and blending club references with a Y2K revival, Doel and Diesel have found each other in that culture. Doel is a place that was almost washed off the map, it has seen distress, much like Diesel’s denim, and is now being reinvigorated through the power of music and art. Diesel, for successful living. Doel, for successful raving.
