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This season, fashion and film are more intertwined than ever. Tributes, inspirations and shows staged like real movies are taking over. The runway has become a movie set, and collections are telling stories worthy of the big screen.
Fashion and cinema have long shared a mutual fascination, but during Milan Fashion Week in September 2025, the dialogue reached a new level. Gucci unveiled its ‘La Famiglia” collection not through a traditional runway show, but with a short film titled The Tiger, directed by Spike Jonze and Halina Reijn, starring Demi Moore, Julia Garner and Daisy Edgar-Jones. Framed as a true cinematic premiere, the film transformed each outfit into a costume and every model into a character, inviting the audience to experience the collection as a narrative.
This blending of fashion and cinema is not entirely new, but it is gaining visibility and legitimacy. For several seasons, houses have experimented with hybrid formats, mixing cinematic storytelling with runway dramaturgy. During the pandemic, videos and short films emerged as substitutes for live shows. Gucci now takes a symbolic step further: clothes are no longer simply shown, they are performed and brought to life through the filmmaker’s lens.
When the Runway Becomes a Story
Cinematic inspiration extends beyond the medium of presentation and into the very aesthetics of collections and staging. A landmark example remains Alexander McQueen’s “The Overlook” collection for Fall-Winter 1999, named after the hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The artificial snow falling on the runway and the unsettling atmosphere gave the show an almost cinematic quality.
Another unforgettable moment came in 2006, during the “Widows of Culloden” show, when McQueen projected a spectral image of Kate Moss in a flowing gown. The vision, hailed as one of the most poetic gestures in contemporary fashion, borrowed directly from the language of fantasy cinema.
Many designers continue to explore this cinematic vocabulary. Some shows unfold like full scripts, with acts, climaxes and dramatic tension. Lighting, music and pacing transform the runway into a film set. While not every house adopts this approach, fashion frequently borrows from cinema to reimagine how it tells its stories.
The exchange works in the other direction as well. Cinema often looks to fashion for inspiration: biopics about designers, documentaries and fictional films such as Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter, shot during Paris Fashion Week in 1994, which made the runway itself a central stage.
Today this convergence is clearer than ever. Houses like Gucci are embracing film as a primary medium, dissolving the boundary between fashion event and cinematic experience. The result enriches both worlds: fashion gains narrative depth and new audiences, while cinema finds in designers’ creativity a renewed visual language.
On the runway as on the screen, the ambition is the same: to spark imagination, inspire dreams and invite viewers into a world where anything feels possible, if only for the length of a show or a film.
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