When Claudia Cardinale dies, and Demna begins Gucci with a film.

Yesterday marked two moments. Claudia Cardinale, the icon of Italian cinema, The Leopard, 8 ½, Fellini, Visconti, passed away. And Gucci, under Demna, began its new chapter not on the runway but on screen, with The Tiger.

The coincidence matters. Cardinale embodied the golden age of Italian cinema, where families and interiors stood as allegories for entire societies. Demna now draws from that same language: staging Gucci as a family drama around a dinner table, with Demi Moore as Barbara Gucci trying to hold order while everything fractures. The tiger in the room becomes the industry itself, devouring, impossible to appease, impossible to resist.

This is not spectacle in the usual fashion sense. It is allegory. A cinematic language where fashion is baggage, weight, inheritance: “baby luggage, mommy luggage, daddy luggage.” History is twisted into myth, collapse staged as survival. Like Cardinale’s films, glamour and dysfunction sit side by side, beauty shadowed by decay.

The strategy is clear: by avoiding the catwalk, Demna controls his context. Cinema slows fashion down, embedding it in narrative, symbolism, and archetype. As Roland Barthes wrote, myth naturalises itself until distortion feels like truth. And as Baudrillard warned, spectacle eventually becomes self-devouring. The Tiger shows both processes at work.

It is also unmistakably Demna: satire and sincerity, exaggeration and critique, the refusal to resolve contradictions. His authorship seeps through the fabric of the work even when his name does not appear - and in that silence, it speaks loudest.