Much like a learner driver, or a toddler in their father’s shoes, when a cigarette is in the hands of a non-smoker something just feels a bit… off. There’s something about the mechanics of rolling, lighting, ashing and holding that leaves nowhere for a novice to hide.
As a legacy non-smoker myself, I can attest that whenever, say, after four or five pints at a day festival, I decide it’s time for one of my bi-annual cigarettes, my friends laugh. Not because I am trying to be like them or because the concept of me being a smoker is entirely absurd, but because it is a (dangerous) habit that takes great practice to hone.
This fact appears to be lost on a new generation of influencers and celebrities who have, almost 20 years after the indoor smoking ban, decided that smoking is cool again – or rather that smoking looks cool again.
Just last week, intergenerational arbiters of cool Charlie XCX, 33, and Madonna, 67, shared Djarum Black cloves on the front row of the Saint Laurent menswear show in Paris. The pair posed for pictures to signal that they had buried the hatchet after Madonna, whose album Confessions On A Dancefloor: Part II comes out on 3 July, took umbrage with Charli XCX’s recent lyrics declaring that ‘the dancefloor is dead’.
Taking to Instagram, Madonna clapped back, ‘If your dancefloor feels dead, maybe you’re playing the wrong music.’ What better way, in 2026, to move on from a (blown up, faux) feud than to wear coordinated burgundy outfits on the front row and bask in each other’s fumes?
It was a moment conceivably designed for social media – two icons making amends in the coolest way possible – except it didn’t really land that way for everyone. The response hasn’t been as legendary as the smokers might have hoped and the pictures have been called everything from ‘performative’ to ‘childish’, not least because Madonna has a well-established history of opposing smoking.
However, Charli and Madonna are not alone. Between Hailey Bieber holding a cigarette on the cover of Interview magazine in April, Addison Rae smoking two cigarettes at once in the music video for ‘Aquamarine’ and Kylie Jenner posting photos of a cigarette dangling from her lips for her 382 million followers on Instagram, aesthetic nicotine consumption is having something of a renaissance.
The reason none of these shoots have the same je ne sais quoi as ‘90s paparazzi shots of Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell is because those probably weren’t their first cigarettes. Kate and Naomi were doing it in an authentic, Parisian way, rather than a ‘will this look good with the Paris filter on?’ way. Kate even has the raspy voice to prove it.
Somehow in the past year, their culture has quite literally become a costume, or at least a social media prop.
The explanation for the sudden re-adopting of a dangerous habit – from those have great sway over a young, impressionable and largely female audience – is that smoking equals rebellion. It’s an F U to the status quo. The cover line on Hailey’s Interview shoot was even: ‘Nobody says no to Hailey Bieber.’ Well, yes, that’s probably true. She’s a multi-millionaire beauty mogul married to one of the most famous musicians in the world. It’s not because she smokes the odd Marlboro Light on a commercial photoshoot.
To me this version of female rebellion signals a lack of ambition – and a definite lack of vision. If we want to be bad girl rock stars who don’t play by the rules, why don’t we all just quit our jobs en masse and start a commune by a nice lake? Why don’t we start flipping over stationary cars in the street unprompted? What about cycling around your local area with a boom box (many people still do this in fairness) playing Rage Against the Machine?
Never mind the obvious and well-known perils of smoking, which pushed it out of fashion for a reason, smoking was only ever cool by accident. The minute you start actively thinking it’s cool or, worse still, start pretending to smoke because you think it looks cool, all coolness ceases with immediate effect. The safest way to avoid this vortex is to be like me and smoke half a roll up twice a year when you’re drunk. Now, which celebrity is going to be honest about doing that?
Nikki Peach is a senior writer at Grazia, working across news, entertainment, features. She has also written for the i, i-D and the New Statesman Media Group and covers all things pop culture for Grazia (treating high and lowbrow with equal respect).
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