It’s a summer’s day in Suffolk, some time in 1992. My best friend Rebecca and I are both 14 and lying on our backs in a field. We have a packet of ten Silk Cut between us, and we are practising blowing smoke rings that will make us irresistible to boys.
Everyone we fancy smokes: Slash, Kate Moss, half the Lower Sixth at the boys’ grammar school. It might be 40 years since Richard Doll made the link between smoking and lung cancer, but we don’t care. There’s Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise with his cowboy hat and a Marlboro Red. Johnny Depp – smoking in every sense – in just about everything. It is, durrrr, a truth universally acknowledged that pretty much anyone looks hotter with a cigarette.
Through our late teens and most of our twenties, we then gravitate towards the clouds of smoke that fill every bar, pub, gig and house party in search of men who taste of Marlboro Lights. Sure, you need to wash your hair and all your clothes every day, but this is a small price for the effortless cool that only smoking confers. Besides, how do you even think about flirting without being able to ask – or be asked – for a light? It isn’t alcohol that makes sex happen; it’s the flickering flame of a lighter between two people in a dark corner of a club.
I love all the paraphernalia, too: spinning the wheel of the heavy silver Zippo, a present from my first boyfriend; stuffing a tissue-thin Rizla with earthy Golden Virginia when my student loan is running low, and licking its gummed edge. I adore the ashtrays, miniature works of art, particularly the vintage Michelin Man one that I nicked when on a date at Bibendum. It still sits on my kitchen dresser, too precious to use.
But at some point smoking lost its spark. The allure began to vaporise, thanks in large part to the ban on indoor smoking in 2007. Smoking – and smokers – became less and less attractive. We had to huddle in freezing doorways to feed our depraved cravings. We became pariahs. Cigarettes disappeared behind screens in shops and the sleek packaging was replaced by grotesque images of diseased lungs.
It isn’t alcohol that makes sex happen; it’s the flickering flame of a lighter between two people
Prominent smokers were either stick-thin and heading for oblivion (Amy Winehouse), older reactionaries (Nigel Farage) or considered C2DE (Dot Cotton). On the way to an antenatal appointment, I recall seeing a man on a drip in a wheelchair outside King’s College Hospital. He was cuffed to a prison guard, and had a gasper gripped between thumb and index finger. Now I admire his commitment – but at the time I shuddered.
My husband is not a fan of my smoking and it’s not great when the man you’re in love with recoils, saying: ‘Get away from me – you stink.’ So there are no photos of me in my Vivienne Westwood wedding dress with a cigarette between my lips, which is something I now regret.
But apart from when I was pregnant, I never really stopped smoking. As my friend Arabella Byrne (we met when I asked her for a fag at a Spectator party) has written in this magazine, smoking as a mother of young children ‘helped me to grieve my former life by kidding myself that it wasn’t over’.
If we thought smoking was becoming the preserve of the middle-aged, though, we were wrong. Stick around long enough and everything comes back into fashion – even the main cause of premature death and preventable illness in the UK.
Whether it’s Gen Z’s nostalgia for the 1990s, a rebellion against Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer’s authoritarianism, or the realisation that vaping is naff, nasty and will kill you anyway, smoking is back. At New York Fashion Week last year, the models were smoking. The actress Lily-Rose Depp, like her father, is rarely papped without a fag in hand. When Charlie XCX was asked what ‘brat’, the name of her multi-Grammy-nominated album meant, she said it refers to the type of girl who might have ‘a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top’. We were having brat summers in Suffolk 30 years ago.
Jared Oviatt, creator of @cigfluencers, a ‘hot celebrities smoking’ Instagram account, has said that when he started the page, ‘I was really digging into the archives. But now I feel like I have more current examples than ever.’ They include the actors Zoe Saldana and Paul Mescal and the singer Sabrina Carpenter, alongside iconic smokers such as Bob Dylan, David Lynch and almost every 1990s supermodel. There are entire Pinterest pages dedicated to Johnny Depp smoking.
Molly, our 19-year-old babysitter, confirms that ‘literally everyone I know has, like, quit vaping and started smoking in the last couple of years… there’s such a culture of people thinking it’s attractive. I’m not sure how to explain it.’
I realise the advice I’m about to impart is not becoming to a supposedly responsible mother of three, but I give it anyway. ‘Don’t overthink it,’ I say, ‘most people look hotter with a fag hanging out of their mouth.’
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