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

Stay forward of the development in trend and past with our free weekly Lifestyle Edit publication

Stay forward of the development in trend and past with our free weekly Lifestyle Edit publication

Of all of the trend tendencies to make a comeback, cigarettes have been an unlikely contender. After all, it’s 2024. A 12 months when you may’t go 10 minutes on an evening out with out smelling the saccharine scent of somebody’s neon-pink vape. A 12 months when a packet of Marlboro Golds comes lined in images of rotting enamel and prices £15. A 12 months when asking somebody for a lighter is much less of a come-on than it’s a cry for assist.

And but, that is the 12 months that smoking has formally change into “cool” once more. That’s the way it appears, anyway, in the event you check out latest fashionable tradition. Consider the catwalks at London Fashion Week earlier this month, the place cigarettes have been so current at exhibits that attendees started to wonder if well being consultants had dominated that really smoking is good for you and that Rishi Sunak had U-turned on many years of laws banning it indoors (none of this has occurred, FYI).

At Edward Crutchley, fashions swaggered down the runway with unlit cigarettes held excessive of their fingers, presenting them as a key accent for autumn/winter 2024. Inspired by Greek god Dionysus, aka the god of wine and indulgence, the gathering paid homage to the long-lost artwork of old style hedonism: all lurex jacquard and latex lace-up shorts (sure, actually). But cigarettes have been arguably the standout star of the present, not least due to how uncommon it’s to see such a factor glamourised on 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 labored: the style crowd gleefully held up their smartphones to doc every and each cigarette for social media. Despite the dearth of clear intention behind it, Crutchley’s choice by the way foreshadowed using cigarettes elsewhere amongst trend designers. Take Sinead Gorey, whose assortment, impressed by the British teenage expertise, noticed fashions stuff packs of cigarettes into the hem of their thigh-high Argyle stockings. The complete factor was colored by a playful retrospective take a look at what it meant to be younger within the early Noughties, with fashions sporting 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 clear minimalism, it’s an period that appears additional and additional away. Perhaps that’s what’s sparking this intrigue amongst designers, who’re wanting again on the latest previous – questioning how we steered so removed from it in such a brief time frame, and what we’d’ve misplaced alongside the way in which.

That appeared to be the case over at Aaron Esh, too. The London-born, Central Saint Martins graduate’s autumn/winter 2024 assortment, which debuted to a lot fanfare among the many trend set, welcomed its visitors with flutes of champagne and a crystal bowl full of Marlboro Golds. Vogue wrote that the present “evoked blurry snapshots of Kate Moss strolling home at 5am”. Instantly, the picture conjures up the infinite tabloid images of Moss within the early Noughties travailing the town streets, cigarette in hand, sporting the sort of midriff-baring tops and outsized Olsen-style shades present in Esh’s latest assortment. It’s one other bygone period on condition that the famously wild British supermodel not too long ago loved an alcohol-free fiftieth birthday celebration and has even launched her personal wellness model, Cosmoss. She can be mentioned to smoke solely “occasionally” these days.

It’s not simply the style pack that’s puffing away, both. This 12 months, a few of the most-talked about movies are additionally essentially the most smoked-about, so to talk. Throughout Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, pegged to be named Best Picture at subsequent month’s Oscars, lead actor Cillian Murphy smoked roughly 3,000 cigarettes, a determine so excessive that he has vowed to play a non-smoker in his subsequent movie. According to The Times, smoking featured in 137 scenes, whereas 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 virtually each single shot. Finally, there was, after all, Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s polarising satire of the higher lessons during which nearly each character is a chain-smoking caricature whose default pose is a crystal glass in a single hand and a Camel Blue within the different. Fennell defined that she purposely set the movie in 2006 as a result of she wished her characters to be smoking indoors earlier than the nationwide ban got here into place in 2007.

According to analysis by Smokefree Media, an anti-smoking foyer group that tracks cigarette utilization in movies, cinema’s renewed love of lighting up displays a marked change from earlier years, with the depiction of smoking on display screen having fallen from 75 per cent of mainstream movies to simply 38 per cent final 12 months. The proportion of movies to characteristic smoking in 2023, nonetheless, was two per cent larger than in 2022.

TV isn’t any higher. HBO’s The Idol featured loads of scenes of its star Lily-Rose Depp, who smokes in actual life, puffing seductively on varied cigarettes from scene to scene. Elsewhere, the titular character in Netflix’s massively fashionable present, Griselda, isn’t seen with out a cigarette dangling from her lips. And let’s not even begin itemizing the lengthy line of celeb people who smoke, a lot of whom are documented fastidiously on the Instagram account @Cigfluencers, which at present boasts 40,000 followers. Regulars embrace Charli XCX, who was not too long ago photographed smoking a cigarette for The Face, Anya Taylor-Joy, Kaia Gerber, Maisie Williams… and many, many extra.

So, what’s going on? Because final time we checked, smoking was nonetheless the reason for round seven out of each 10 instances of lung most cancers, with round 76,000 folks within the UK dying from the behavior every year, in response to the NHS. It additionally damages your coronary heart and blood circulation, and worsens signs of respiratory circumstances. Smoking even causes erectile dysfunction. None of this has modified.

And but, the latest romanticisation of smoking on our screens and runways coincides with rising charges of smoking amongst younger folks. In January, a brand new examine from University College London (UCL) revealed that there was a significant surge in 18- to 24-year-olds in England taking over smoking through the pandemic. Before Covid, the variety of folks smoking general was falling 5.2 per cent per 12 months, however since 2020, the speed of lower has slowed to simply 0.3 per cent.

The factor that unites all of those references isn’t the fetishisation of a behavior which will or might not flip your insides to tar. Of course it isn’t. It’s about nostalgia and what smoking represents after we look again on the previous. Think in regards to the growing curiosity in Y2K trend and late Nineteen Nineties aesthetics, for instance; the life-style related to these time durations can be making a triumphant return, each in our wardrobes and on social media. Even present magnificence tendencies appear to be dictated by this period – what number of instances have you seen an “Effie from Skins” make-up tutorial (suppose smudged kohl-rimmed eyes and pale pink pouts) on Instagram?

These have been instances of pure, bacchanalian chaos. A considerably utopian pre-social media age when folks behaved a bit of extra wildly – and sure, most of them additionally smoked. So no, it’s not cigarettes that anybody is making an attempt to advertise or endorse. It’s an out of date period that was enjoyable whereas it lasted, however for varied causes, one that doesn’t – and can not – exist at the moment. Perhaps it’s solely pure to need to mourn that a bit of.