Discover the steampunk style: Dieselpunk

Let's discover what is the Dieselpunk? a super movement based on steampunk

It is considered by some people like the most important steampunk derivative genre of all?

When you work on alternative styles, this is the kind of question that often comes up. With hard work, you know how to break down the influences and sub-genres used, just like a seasoned stylist or fashion designer. How often do we ask ourselves the question when we run an online store to know if this or that object fits in this or that box, certainly quite often. In short, we have become an accidental authority on what is and what is not dieselpunk.


In the Steampunkstyler team, we've been cosplayers and steampunk fans for a long time, and actually used elements of dieselpunk long before there was ever a word "dieselpunk", and I've seen many other names for it until the 2000s.

What is the dieselpunk: Definition:

According to Wikipedia:

"Dieselpunk is a genre like its better-known cousin "steampunk" that combines the aesthetics of interwar diesel technology through the 1950s with retro-futuristic technology and postmodern sensibilities." more on this site.

Like steampunk, the name "dieselpunk" is a derivative of the cyberpunk genre, the good old 1980s science fiction of William Gibson (Neuromancer).  A lot of the steampunk fashion get its inspiration from this movement. The term is used to represent the period - or "era" - from the interwar years through the 1950s, when diesel engines, or not, were the main technological advance in Western culture. The suffix "-punk" attached to the name is representative of the counter-cultural nature of the genre in terms of its opposition to contemporary aesthetics. The term also refers to the family of names given to the derivative similar to cyber, such as steampunk.

Because it's from Wikipedia, people seem to think that's "the" definition.

Now here's ours:
The word was first used by Lewis Pollack in his 2001 role-playing game, Children of the Sun. It sounds like steampunk, but the industrial revolution and the Victorian era give way to the troubled times of the world wars. A dark world dominated by war, the army, its codes and its iconography. A world that is finally quite different from the world of the advent of steam, replaced by oil and electricity. A sentence summarizes all this by the fans: Because steam just wasn't dirty enough.

Dieselpunk is a celebration of the retro futurism of the 1920s - 1940s. The genre requires imagination and reinterpretation like any uchrony of the future of tomorrow through the eyes of yesterday. The visual aesthetic incorporates elements of art deco, film noir, prohibition, gangsters and the Great War combined with science fiction, fantasy, magic, alternate history and future technology to create a unique and distinct genre. An other steampunk style that you should discover is the Asian Steampunk style and the Cyberpunk.

In short, after all my reading, writing, and observations over the years, I've discovered that Dieselpunk is whatever you or I say it is, as long as it reflects retro-futuristic elements from the 1920s, 1940s, and sometimes the mid-1950s.

Dieselpunk is simply the maintenance of the style aesthetic of the 20's, 30's and 40's, and the absolute cutoff is the early to mid 50's. Nothing more than that, no need to complicate it further. It maintains any aspect of style from that specific period of human history, then free to incorporate science fiction and fantasy.

From there we distinguish two extremes in style: the natural Dieselpunk I would call and the retro future Dieselpunk:

In natural Dieselpunk, people wear authentic vintage clothing or faithful reproductions of clothing from the era. British or Nazi army uniforms are numerous for example.
The retro-futurist Dieselpunk is those of us who are passionate about what the future was like at that time and try to recreate that style and produce those "S-F" elements in everyday life.