Is smoking ‘cool’ again? Why cigarettes have been dominating on our screens and catwalks

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Of all the fashion trends to make a comeback, cigarettes were an unlikely contender. After all, it’s 2024. A year when you can’t go 10 minutes on a night out without smelling the saccharine scent of someone’s neon-pink vape. A year when a packet of Marlboro Golds comes covered in photos of rotting teeth and costs £15. A year when asking someone for a lighter is less of a come-on than it is a cry for help.

And yet, this is the year that smoking has officially become “cool” again. That’s how it seems, anyway, if you take a look at recent popular culture. Consider the catwalks at London Fashion Week earlier this month, where cigarettes were so present at shows that attendees began to wonder whether health experts had ruled that actually smoking is good for you and that Rishi Sunak had U-turned on decades of legislation banning it indoors (none of this has happened, FYI).

At Edward Crutchley, models swaggered down the runway with unlit cigarettes held high in their hands, presenting them as a key accessory for autumn/winter 2024. Inspired by Greek god Dionysus, aka the god of wine and indulgence, the collection paid homage to the long-lost art of old-fashioned hedonism: all lurex jacquard and latex lace-up shorts (yes, really). But cigarettes were arguably the standout star of the show, not least because of how rare it is to see such a thing glamourised in this day and age.

“There was no great concept or statement behind it,” Crutchley tells The Independent. “I thought it would be something irreverent to lighten the mood a little.” It worked: the fashion crowd gleefully held up their smartphones to document each and every cigarette for social media. Despite the lack of clear intention behind it, Crutchley’s decision incidentally foreshadowed the use of cigarettes elsewhere among fashion designers. Take Sinead Gorey, whose collection, inspired by the British teenage experience, saw models stuff packs of cigarettes into the hem of their thigh-high Argyle stockings. The whole thing was coloured by a playful retrospective look at what it meant to be young in the early Noughties, with models wearing iPod nanos clipped onto their ears, wired headphones dangling onto their chests.

“We used custom-branded cigs to further focus on that time spent between school and the corner shop during your teenage years growing up in Britain,” says Gorey. “We wanted to play with styling such as stuffing bras with keys, lighters, and cig packets… stuffing packets down school socks. It was a simple and humorous nod to that era most people can remember.” Amid modern-day obsessions with wellness and a “stealth wealth” aesthetic that favours slickly clean minimalism, it’s an era that seems further and further away. Perhaps that’s what’s sparking this intrigue among designers, who are looking back on the recent past – wondering how we steered so far from it in such a short period of time, and what we might’ve lost along the way.

That seemed to be the case over at Aaron Esh, too. The London-born, Central Saint Martins graduate’s autumn/winter 2024 collection, which debuted to much fanfare among the fashion set, welcomed its guests with flutes of champagne and a crystal bowl filled with Marlboro Golds. Vogue wrote that the show “evoked blurry snapshots of Kate Moss strolling home at 5am”. Instantly, the image conjures up the endless tabloid photos of Moss in the early Noughties travailing the city streets, cigarette in hand, wearing the kind of midriff-baring tops and oversized Olsen-style shades found in Esh’s recent collection. It’s another bygone era given that the famously wild British supermodel recently enjoyed an alcohol-free 50th birthday party and has even launched her own wellness brand, Cosmoss. She is also said to smoke only “occasionally” nowadays.

It’s not just the fashion pack that’s puffing away, either. This year, some of the most-talked about films are also the most smoked-about, so to speak. Throughout Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, pegged to be named Best Picture at next month’s Oscars, lead actor Cillian Murphy smoked roughly 3,000 cigarettes, a figure so high that he has vowed to play a non-smoker in his next film. According to The Times, smoking featured in 137 scenes, while Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City included 63 appearances from cigarettes and 58 from cigars.

Then there was Maestro, Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic that sees the revered conductor smoking in practically every single shot. Finally, there was, of course, Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s polarising satire of the upper classes in which almost every character is a chain-smoking caricature whose default pose is a crystal glass in one hand and a Camel Blue in the other. Fennell explained that she purposely set the film in 2006 because she wanted her characters to be smoking indoors before the nationwide ban came into place in 2007.

According to research by Smokefree Media, an anti-smoking lobby group that tracks cigarette usage in films, cinema’s renewed love of lighting up reflects a marked change from previous years, with the depiction of smoking on screen having fallen from 75 per cent of mainstream films to just 38 per cent last year. The proportion of films to feature smoking in 2023, however, was two per cent higher than in 2022.

TV is no better. HBO’s The Idol featured plenty of scenes of its star Lily-Rose Depp, who smokes in real life, puffing seductively on various cigarettes from scene to scene. Elsewhere, the titular character in Netflix’s hugely popular show, Griselda, is rarely seen without a cigarette dangling from her lips. And let’s not even start listing the long line of celebrity smokers, many of whom are documented fastidiously on the Instagram account @Cigfluencers, which currently boasts 40,000 followers. Regulars include Charli XCX, who was recently photographed smoking a cigarette for The Face, Anya Taylor-Joy, Kaia Gerber, Maisie Williams… and many, many more.

So, what’s going on? Because last time we checked, smoking was still the cause of around seven out of every 10 cases of lung cancer, with around 76,000 people in the UK dying from the habit each year, according to the NHS. It also damages your heart and blood circulation, and worsens symptoms of respiratory conditions. Smoking even causes erectile dysfunction. None of this has changed.

And yet, the recent romanticisation of smoking on our screens and runways coincides with rising rates of smoking among young people. In January, a new study from University College London (UCL) revealed that there was a major surge in 18- to 24-year-olds in England taking up smoking during the pandemic. Before Covid, the number of people smoking overall was falling 5.2 per cent per year, but since 2020, the rate of decrease has slowed to just 0.3 per cent.

The thing that unites all of these references is not the fetishisation of a habit that may or may not turn your insides to tar. Of course it isn’t. It’s about nostalgia and what smoking represents when we look back on the past. Think about the increasing interest in Y2K fashion and late 1990s aesthetics, for example; the lifestyle associated with these time periods is also making a triumphant return, both in our wardrobes and on social media. Even current beauty trends seem to be dictated by this era – how many times have you seen an “Effie from Skins” makeup tutorial (think smudged kohl-rimmed eyes and pale pink pouts) on Instagram?

These were times of pure, bacchanalian chaos. A somewhat utopian pre-social media age when people behaved a little more wildly – and yes, most of them also smoked. So no, it’s not cigarettes that anyone is trying to promote or endorse. It’s an obsolete era that was fun while it lasted, but for various reasons, one that does not – and cannot – exist today. Perhaps it’s only natural to want to mourn that a little.