Front row at the YSL Men’s show in Milan on Wednesday. Actors Debi Mazar and Connor Storrie sit next to Charli xcx and Madonna. Charli is puffing on a Marlboro Red – the cigarette marque she endorsed as “Brat”, two summers back. Perhaps a tad performatively, Madonna is sucking something slim and brown – a cigarillo, maybe? A few seats along is Kate Moss, unofficial ambassador for Marlboro Lights for almost 30 years now.No one asks for permission; other show guests dare not complain about harmful, secondary fumes. Smoking as rebellion, as rule-breaking, alarm-busting, anti-establishment elitism, is back. Cigarettes – now up to £25 for a packet of 20 and super chic Vogues costing as much as £40 – rebranded as a luxury item.Charli xcx and Madonna at the YSL Men’s show (theperfectmagazine/Instagram)The smoking renaissance started 12 or so years ago with reemergences in entertainment, such as House of Cards, Robin Wright, and Kevin Spacey passing a single, smoking cylinder back and forth at the end of a long White House day. Then adult (and long presumed goody-goody) Gwyneth Paltrow, whose father Bruce once got Madonna to write his teenage daughter a note discouraging her from her two packs a day habit, admitted that she too still enjoyed the occasional cigarette. Now, as all things Nineties come back in fashion, aspers are back in as a kind of photogenic, knowingly cool indulgence.Lady Gaga poses with a filter top in the video for her “Die With A Smile” video and when Charli xcx got married last year, wedding guests were offered plates of free cigarettes. Madonna, who spends an inordinate amount of her time trying to look younger, is publicly puffing on fags, which are guaranteed to make her look older.The interior designer Nicky Haslam smokes Super Kings at dinner parties and doesn’t give a stuff about ruffling his fellow diners. In the 21st century, smoking a cigarette, Haslam reckons, is the ultimate insurrection. You could snort a line of coke in public and no one would bat an eyelid, says Nicky. “But light up a Marlboro, and everyone goes crazy.”Even buying them has become an aspirationally shamefully, quasi-illicit experience – the theatrical event when the supermarket staff noisily draws back that big formica door to reveal the doomy packs, now decorated with what looks like body horror, YBA artworks from the 1990s.‘Brat’ singer Charli xcx is one of the main pioneers of the smoking renaissance (Charli xcx/Instagram)Or you can go to a “dealer”. Legal sales of cigarettes may be down by 52 per cent in the UK (that’s still 12.6 billion sticks sold every year by the way), but with astronomical pricing a key factor across all demographics, the black market is booming – which might explain how Gen Z can afford their newest dirty habit. Here are some amazing figures to suck on. In Australia, a pack of Marlboros costs the equivalent of £27,09. In Nigeria, they are 55p. In Russia? £2.63 Most of the UK’s contraband cigarettes come from Belarus (610 million illegally sold cigs were estimated to have originated from Belarus), where Marlboros are £2.19 per pack. You buy them under the counter at dodgy late-night grocery stores or from “dealers”. This new and unforeseen cigarettes renaissance is very bad timing for the industry, which has grown tired of trying to kill its customers with a carcinogenic combination of arsenic, lead, ammonia, formaldehyde, benzene and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and is now intent on killing itself instead, effectively stubbing out a multi-billion dollar business on the back of its own hand.Even buying them has become an aspirationally shamefully, quasi-illicit experience – the theatrical event when the supermarket staff noisily draws back that big formica door to reveal the doomy packsIn 2021, Philip Morris International announced that it intends to “un-smoke the world”, stopping the sale of Marlboro cigarettes altogether in Britain within a decade.Audaciously, the tobacco giant also proposed the notion of “a world without cigarettes”, calling on the UK government to actively ban the sale of its tobacco products. Philip Morris CEO Jacek Olczak suggested that the UK government should start treating cigarettes like petrol-powered cars, the sale of which is facing a ban. The sooner it happens, the better it is for everyone, the spokesperson said.Pretty amazing when you consider that, just a few short years ago, Philip Morris’s Marlboro brand was the world’s most profitable tobacco product. Estimated to be worth $33.6bn (£25.5bn), Marlboro’s value sat somewhere between megabrands like McDonald's and Visa.And get this: with its marketing muscle now fully behind the IQOS e-cigarette, a device that heats tobacco to deliver nicotine without the smoke and tar that cause diseases (including cancer), Philip Morris plans to reposition itself as...wait for it, a “health and wellness” brand.Smokers chic: Kate Moss was often seen smoking Marlboros back in the day (Getty)So, without Marlboro Golds (the cigarette formerly known as Marlboro Lights and still called that by, well, everyone), what will the fashion industry A-listers in Paris, Milan and London smoke between shows, looks and shots? How will the stylists, photographers, PRs, party organisers and model agency dudes get through the day without an uxorious draw on their long, cork-tipped cylinders of poisoned pleasure? Kate Moss does not do wellness well, just look at the failure of her “healing brand” Cosmoss which entered voluntary liquidation in June 2025, less than three years after launch.Getting the supermodels on board was Marlboro’s greatest, accidental coup; Linda Evangelista (smoking hot in George Michael’s “Freedom ‘90” video) Naomi Campbell, Heidi Klum, Tatiana Patitz and Christy Turlington (to be later followed by Bella and Gigi Hadid, Alessandra Amboriso and Kendall Jenner) All these girls knew/know that a pack of Marlboros a day kept the chubby thighs at bay – cigarettes being a widely acknowledged appetite suppressant. Especially when paired with copious vodka and the company of an INXS singer.Freedom: Linda Evangelista lights one up in the George Michael music video (Columbia Records)During the 1990s, Kate Moss was said to be raking in around $7.2m a year via deals with the likes of Burberry, Chanel and Dior. Back in 2006, she landed a £1.5m contract with Calvin Klein. But her most loyal and gilded partnership was surely with the Marlboro Lights flip-top pack, which she promoted with reliable and casually professional zeal. Pretty much every night, for around 20 years.A lot of kids turn to cigarettes to get off of vapes and even nicotine pouches because those are very addictiveMelissa Little, associate professor at University of VirginiaHow much were Marlboro and Philip Morris paying Kate? Zip. Zero pounds. Kate was Marlboro’s coolest and sexiest brand ambassador, and she did it for free. For the love of the warm (and addictive) glow of the yellow flame ignition, the long, noirish drag, the fuggy blast of sweetly noxious, bluey-grey cloud that followed as a magically metrological coda.So here we are, full circle. Why is cigarette smoking making a comeback amongst Gen Z, and with rebel boomers like Madonna? After all, she almost ended an open-air show in Chile back in 2012 after spotting people smoking in the crowd. Charli, Dakota and Madge know that cigarette smoking creates an intense and intimate mis-en-scene (in 2024, over half of the top box office films contained depictions of tobacco). Close conversion, out on a balcony or on a townhouse stoop, on a fashion front row, away from the noise of the party. Leave the rules and regulations to the squares and the civilians – the act of smoking slows down the narrative; the inhalations engender meaningful pauses. You can also meet-cute with smoking. Do you have a light? Can I bum a cigarette? A lone smoke, perhaps exhaling from a car window, suggests moody character, rebellion and libido. You don’t get this interaction and intonation with the wholly autonomous and unshared vape experience. But this is very much for the kids, not the Madges of this world, who just look embarrassingly try-hard, not to mention might have to worry a bit more about the nicotine-induced ageing than the average twentysomething.Madonna is evidently aware of the new optics of smoking – but such looks might be more applicable for the younger set (AFP/Getty)Melissa Little, associate professor in Public Health Sciences at the University of Virginia, has a theory that for younger smokers, cigarettes are regarded as a “healthier” alternative to the infinitely more addictive habit of vaping (which can be done ad infinitum indoors). “A lot of kids turn to cigarettes to get off of vapes and even nicotine pouches because those are very addictive,” she says. Lighting up requires more commitment, also. “Going outside to smoke a cigarette takes more effort than discreetly hitting a vape indoors.”There’s an anti-tech argument as well, suggests Melissa Little. People are getting tired of constant screens, technology and AI. (Many vapes are battery-powered) “This is kind of a revolt against all of that.” Whether they will be just as pleased for a trip to the inside of a cancer ward a few years down the line, remains to be seen.