The fashion label Diesel is making a statement with its new spring ad campaign, We Are Connected. Diesel had fashion editor and blogger Jillian Mercado model for this campaign. Mercado has been a wheelchair user since she was 12 due to spastic muscular dystrophy.
Mercado said on the Today Show:
Diesel is a company where everyone can wear it. You don’t have to look like a model to wear it. And I feel like these photos just show that. Every photo that they release, someone can relate to it. And that’s rare in the fashion industry, to be able to relate and say, ‘You know that’s me in that photo, through that person.’
In an industry consumed with criticism and everything being based on appearance, this campaign makes a bold statement.
Diesel’s self-styled brand reboot features an arresting array of real-life artists and creatives who “reject the status quo” and aim to “change points of view through imagery.” They include bikers, cyberpunks and Japanese street-style teens, said The LA Times Rene Lynch.
Mercado writes the blog Manufactured 1987 and edits a digital magazine called We the Urban.