Smoking. Hot?

 

The slim tube of paper rests elegantly between my fingers—I can almost inhale a swirl of smoke emerging from it. ‘Are you going to eat that lollipop?’ my mother asks. I gingerly turn the sweet the right way round and suck on sugar instead of fictional nicotine (not that I am aware of nicotine, aged ten). I know what is coming: ‘promise me you’ll never get addicted to smoking. It really isn’t cool’. To dispute the health effects of smoking would be laughable. It is synonymous with cancer. So, nine years later, what am I doing in a club smoking area, shivering over a cigarette?

 

It’s not just me—according to ASH, 8.2% of 16-24 year olds were smokers in 2023, a number which is, thankfully, decreasing. At least half of my friends have a tendency towards the ‘drunk cigarette’—which, I hate to tell you, does begin to count when it becomes a weekly occurrence. If we smoked for the nicotine, surely vaping, with its supposedly reduced (though still very much present) health effects, would be the unanimous choice.

 

But smoking isn’t about nicotine—to some extent, it’s just an added bonus. Nor do we smoke because, as a girl once explained to me in wide eyed earnest, ‘with smoking you know what the risks are, so it just feels safer really’—a line which proves that not even Oxford students are safe from the warped logic used to cover up the real reason we smoke. Our posed hands, our pouting lips, our Instagram posts featuring a pack of Vogues leaning delicately against bottles of red wine all give it away: we aren’t just getting high on nicotine, we are getting high on cool.

 

Let’s try to dissect a problem which my adolescent self could only dream of solving: what is cool and how does one become it? The use of the word cool to denote something other than ‘cold’ originated in the African American Jazz scene in the 1940s, and described a laid-back, smooth Jazz style. Over time, the term has morphed to resemble something more akin to ‘sprezzatura’, for which our only equivalent is ‘nonchalance’. Sprezzatura was first used by the less nonchalantly named Count Baldesar Castigione in his 1528 Book of the Courtier, an extensive exploration of the ideal courtier. According to Castigione, the epitome of grace is a perfect carelessness ‘that shall conceal design and show that what is done and said is done without effort and almost without thought’. 

 

Import these concepts to where I first attempted to achieve coolness—a girls’ school in the Midlands—and you are left with a vague descendant of Effy from Skins: badly straightened hair, skirt rolled up to reveal the beginnings of a ladder in her tights, and, of course, a cigarette, most likely smoked for the same amount of time it takes to film and post a video on Snapchat. It is probably a testament to my frustratingly good relationship with my parents that this was never me—but, God, how I wanted it to be.

 

I didn’t actually want to rip my tights or smoke; what I truly desired was what these things, if procured naturally and without scissors, represented. Of course, the cigarette represents rebellion, but what is so attractive about rebellion? Perhaps it is the admiration garnered from breaking parental rules and, ironically, conforming to another set of social rules: that of the ‘in group’.

 

The popular girls at my secondary school had formed their own exclusive family, of which I desperately wanted to be a part. They were aloof because they could afford to be—they had enough social capital already. They didn’t care about their school work because they had a large enough inheritance not to. What lay behind their rebellious, cliquey behaviour is everything that appeals to us as little human beings who only want the acceptance and approval of other little human beings. Cool is the appearance of effortless perfection. On an anthropological level, however, our desire to be cool reflects a desire for the stability which comes from conforming to the group, conforming to social ideals which promise a position on the perceived social hierarchy.  

 

How then, has sucking on a cancerous tube of paper come to represent all of this? Cigarettes were first produced in the 16th century, when Spanish beggars rolled discarded cigar butts into paper for smoking, creating ‘cigarrillos’—certainly a far cry from the ‘heroin chic’ aesthetic of the 1990s. It was not until 1880, when the invention of the Bonsack machine allowed for mass production of cigarettes, that they started to become the widespread cultural symbols we recognise today. 

 

Cigarettes appeared in the media everywhere—not only in advertisements, but also in films and TV shows through product placement—and it is largely this way that cigarettes gained their association with cool. When a 90s audience gazed at James Bond smoking Lark cigarettes in Licence to Kill, the connection between smoking and the socially desirable ideals that James Bond represents was all too easily made. 

 

In his 1957 work, Mythologies, the French philosopher Roland Barthes uses an analytic framework which we can use to explain how the symbolic, cool-factor of the cigarette becomes culturally ingrained. Barthes splits a piece of media—an advertisement or a work of cinema—into three parts, all of which work together in what he calls a ‘mythological system’. First, we have the ‘signified’, which could be any concept; in the case of advertising it is usually a socially desirable attribute such as beauty or wealth. We then have the ‘signifier’—the image, phrase, or object used to convey the signified. Finally, the ‘sign’ stands as the combination of the two, as its own entity. 

 

James Bond turns the cigarette, a neutral object, into a sign of desirability—representing his masculinity, sexual prowess, and luxurious lifestyle. This connection is, of course, purely symbolic—a tube of paper and masculinity have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Except, we take the coolness signified by a cigarette for granted—in the same way that we accept a group of sounds to signify a concept, forming a word. In fact, mythologies are so powerful that they often form our perceived reality just as much as scientific evidence. Through this process, for example, it was possible to advertise cigarettes as healthy, despite coughing and withdrawal symptoms suggesting otherwise. 

 

The lack of real connection between signifier and signified also accounts for why the cigarette has so many contradictory associations. Quentin Tarantino’s Mia Wallace provides a contrasting example to the ‘masculine’ coolness denoted by James Bond.  There is no need to explain how, with her red lips and untucked shirt, she embodies sprezzatura. What makes her so interesting is that, in spite of being the antithesis to the strength of James Bond (with an abusive husband and on the verge of dying of an overdose) she makes you want to smoke—or me, at least, watching the film at fourteen. 

 

In a classic fetishisation of female victimhood, Tarantino combines Mia’s assured sensuality with a dramatic mental instability, heightening her sprezzatura to the extreme. Mia is damaged, yet so beautiful. Smoking, specifically as a health threat, becomes bound up as a sign of her idealised infirmity. The cigarette has been made into a sign, a commodified token of idealised masculinity, femininity, joined with our desire for sprezzatura. 

 

Although advertising cigarettes is now illegal, the cigarette’s symbolic value still smoulders. A quick scroll on Instagram reveals a concerning rise in the heroin chic aesthetic of the 90s: a young Kate Moss letting loose at an afterparty, taking drags on what is probably a Vogue. This aesthetic idealises the fragility of thin models who are ever so slightly losing it. Throw a cigarette at them, and it becomes a signifier of their heedless, party girl lifestyle, their delicate youth on the brink of decline. So too with the coquettish aesthetic linked to Lana del Rey, or Addison Rae trilling ‘I need a cigarette to make me feel better’. 

 

The key, and dangerous, difference between earlier and later depictions of the cigarette is that today, the cigarette’s health effects are acknowledged and appropriated into fetishised self-destruction. Whilst there is something distinctly feminine associated with this depiction of the cigarette, we only need to rephrase ‘fragile femininity’ to ‘tortured intellectual’ in order to create a version of this myth which leans into idealised constructions of masculinity.

 

Consciously or not, we transform the cigarette into a sign of rebellion, beauty and social desirability—but ultimately, it is just an object which makes a few people a lot of money. It also damages just about every organ in the body, including the brain—tortured intellectual, indeed. What my cool-obsessed teenage self needed was a lesson in communicating with words, not commodities. I say this as much to myself as I do to you: buying the Isis Magazine lighter will not quell your social insecurities. Actually interacting with people will. 

 

Art by Leon Moorhouse.