We’re only a quarter through 2026 and it’s evident that some of last year’s budding trends have fully bloomed.
The Clean Girl look has been totally upstaged by her cooler younger sister, the Messy Girl; Ozempic fuelled hyper-thinness has nearly annihilated whatever lingers of the body positivity culture from the previous decade; obsession with y2k has spilled past “indie sleaze” and everyday mall fashion and become a major cultural touchstone in its own right.
All in all, it was inevitable that cigarettes were going to come back into vogue. Pardon the pun.
More than any of her sisters, Kylie Jenner remains the metric in which we can measure the passage of a concept from counterculture to culture. Her most recent cover story with Vanity Fair – one of Western media’s glitziest, grandest arbiters for what counts as mainstream culture – saw the reality tv star turned red carpet siren posed upon a bed. She wears a balconette bra and high rise trousers, legs spread open like a man on the Subway.
The most important element, however, is the cigarette pursed between her world-famous lips.
With eyebrows dyed the shade of flesh and her raven hair long and even somewhat messy, she – or the Vanity Fair team – is clearly aware that the aforementioned Messy Girl aesthetic is not just in, it’s paid the coat check fee and set up a tab at the bar.
Since Charli xcx’s seismic, zeitgeist charging Brat album, and the subsequent Brat summer, the messily put together woman has become the look championed by the musicians and artists in her cohort. They're chasing Charli as she runs up and down a stage in nothing but her trademark raver shades, black bra and bum shorts, her dark hair almost identical to Jenner’s cover shot.
Around her, models of the moment, Gabriette and Alex Consani, sport razor thin – or visually invisible – eyebrow looks while The Dare and Matty Healy roll out of bed in shirts and skinny ties, hair disheveled, eyes still dark from the club.
It’s also cigarettes galore. Brat shook the young by their shoulders and demanded they age and party. They emerged from that moment with slim white cigarettes held in their mouths and clutched between fingers. Their queen even presented upon them on a platter at her Italian wedding to George Daniel, band member of The 1975 alongside Healy.
Celebrities have long smoked. Images proving this fact are near-infinite, and there was a time we, as a public, weren’t having it. Zayn Malik please don’t smoke we love you was a 2014 battle cry. I say ‘we’ to be communal; raised in London, us Brits are at our most European in our national love affair for a cig and a pint. Keir Starmer tried to ban smoking in pub gardens once, and he was called unpatriotic. Jokes aside, the nostalgia fuelled excitement around them predates Brat and its mandate of hedonism. Instagram account @ciginfluencers has enjoyed an international following of hundreds and thousands for years now, sharing pictures of famous people puffing on a Camel Blue.
Gatherings of the usual suspects – the Olsen twins, Lana Del Rey, Sky Ferreira, basically anyone associated with the last generation’s brigade of party people – slowly started to feature younger stars, too. Lily Rose Depp; Bella Hadid; Kaia Gerber. (Also, Paul Mescal and Dua Lipa, but again: European.) Anecdotally, my New York City born and bred best friend, a former Sorority girl, has noted that her friends have picked up the habit in recent years.
And last year, the cig-sphere expanded into the lyrics of popular music.
Maintaining an X account is worth it for the sporadic one-liners of brilliance, and in this case, it was someone noting the difference between how Addison Rae and Lorde sing about smoking in their respective charting singles. “Need a cigarette to make me feel better”, Addison purrs in Headphones On. “I remember saying then, ‘this is the best cigarette of my life’”, Lorde states in What Was That. “You can so tell who actually smokes and who doesn’t from these lyrics lmao,” commented the user.
A recurring face on @ciginfluencers, Lorde has been papped smoking before. Addison, on the other hand, has used cigarettes in a vein more similar to Kylie; purposeful, even editorial. Her late 2024 music video for “Aquamarine” had the TikToker turned pop star posing with two in her mouth, something even Don Draper wouldn’t attempt.
Men are being coaxed into this potential form of posturing, too. Shot for Interview magazine, Love Story breakout star Paul Anthony Kelly, dapper in a tux, stares at the camera with an unlit cigarette in his mouth. Rae and Kelly aren’t even smoking these staged cigarettes. Where smokers once had to pretend not to smoke, potential non-smokers are today advertising themselves as smokers.
Naturally, these props have purpose.
Cigarettes are bad for the individual’s health, and that of those that surround them; most will agree they smell. In an international culture of unprecedented, obsessive wellness, these agents of ill health and even societal awkwardness are by their very nature counterculture, because they totally subvert the tenets of the ubiquitous Clean Girl philosophy. (Unless, of course, you’re Gwyneth Paltrow.) Importantly, these public figures that brandish the cigarette like a designer bag are seemingly immortal in their youth, beauty, and, relevantly, thinness. Cigarettes being part of the 1950s weight loss manual of housewives has not exactly been proven wrong by its legions of steadfast size 0s.
If the currency of cool is quantified by not caring, what could be cooler than publicly displaying you don’t care about your health — or what the hand-wringing after school special sphere thinks of you?
Importantly, cigarettes have decades of good PR. Whether it’s the glamour of Old Hollywood, the social media-led allure of a Mediterranean lifestyle, or the definitive indie sleaze revival, Carrie Bradshaw once again appears a prophet of aesthetics for her Red Marlboro clutching city-slicker look. Jean styles come and go, cocktails go in and out of fashion; but the one unifying thread of continuity within all these major cultural sticking points of today involve a cigarette. Are they in, or are they out?
Today, they enjoy the kind of product placement brands could only ever dream of. No wonder Kylie and Addison position themselves as smokers, desperate to shake off any remaining residue of being too mainstream, too embedded in the sprawling suburbia of Los Angeles.
For most, it takes about a month of coughing and spluttering, headaches and even nausea for the body to accept this cocktail of toxins. In both the States and Europe, school children are taught that nicotine is harmful and addictive. To decide to pick up a cig anyway, and do it again and again, takes dedication, then apathy. Luckily, therefore, there’s a third option: get snapped lighting one up for the front cover of a fashion magazine. Whether one inhales after the click of the camera is up to the individual’s discretion. And, of course, our collective dissection.
Images via Getty
