Diesel’s New Shirts Cost Up to $5.5 Million, but Each Comes With a Luxury Condo

Fashion giant Diesel, no stranger to stunt marketing, has launched a line of simple cotton shirts as a high-profile ruse. The apparel is just the window dressing, if you will, to the main attraction: the first Diesel-branded condo complex in Miami’s artsy up-and-coming Wynwood district.

Buy the outlandishly priced article of clothing and get a luxury dwelling for “free.” Or if you’re pseudo-slumming it, there’s a version for $370,000.

Each shirt bears the floor plan of a unit in the eight-story building, still in the rendering stages, and not one of them says: “I spent $1 million and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.” Instead, the program is called, “The Condo T-Shirts—The Most Expensive T-Shirts Ever.”

“When we began thinking about the launch of Diesel Wynwood, we asked ourselves, ‘How can a largely apparel company like Diesel enter the real estate world?’” said Andrea Rosso, creative director at Diesel Licenses. “The answer was through what is essentially the entry point in fashion: the T-shirt. Once we landed on this, we knew it was the perfect Diesel way to launch.”

The brand’s agency, New York-based startup Small, wanted to “challenge conformity” and capture Diesel’s history of “brave advertising.”

“From this came the idea to sell the world’s most expensive T-shirts and essentially give the condos away for free,” said Luca Lorenzini and Luca Pannese, Small’s co-founders and executive creative directors.

For about $1 million, the buyer gets a T-shirt marked “D6-L7,” which is a 1,900-square-foot one-bedroom, 2.5-bath unit with a den. The ultimate splurge is “F2-L7,” which comes with a 2,376-square-foot one-bedroom, 1.5-bath penthouse for a cool $5.5 million. 

In their defense, the shirts are “extremely easy to fold,” says the tongue-in-cheek ad, which also touts the one-of-a-kind duds as “wearable multiple times” and “accurately machine sewn.”

Scoff at the price tag, but check out the specs of the tony Diesel Wynwood. There are 143 units planned for the industrial-style building, designed by Zyscovich Architects and set to begin construction in April 2020. In addition to residential and commercial space, there will be an interior courtyard, art gallery, meditation room, pool and roof deck, with lots of tropical foliage scattered around the property.

The development, breaking ground in a former garment district that’s gentrified in recent years, is a partnership between Diesel and Italian real estate company Bel Invest Group. It’s WELL-certified, meaning its environment means to promote healthy living.

Diesel’s stunt, which officially opens sales of the condos, coincides with the annual Art Basel Miami Beach, when tens of thousands of art lovers flood the city. It follows a few other attention-grabbing marketing maneuvers from the brand like this fall’s semi-transparent line of luggage with Samsonite, and the fake pop-up shop selling “knockoff” and intentionally misspelled “Deisel” products for New York Fashion Week in 2018.