When I was a child I was led to believe that great diabolical temptation, “smoking”, would present itself to me, serpentine, hanging around a disused bike shed or down a ginnel on the way home from school.
It would probably involve peer pressure, and how I responded to it would determine both the course of my future and my classification as either a good or bad person. It did not seem difficult to do. I had grown up in a world where smoking was bad: bad for your health, done by bad girls, morally bad.
Now we live in a world that where smoking is good. Or bad – but in the cool way. Subversive, carefree, fun, part of an aesthetic of old-school elegance, or hedonism, or both.
Charli xcx, who declared “pack of cigs and a Bic lighter” central to her “brat” era two years ago; globetrotting, hard-partying, well-read Dua Lipa; beautiful Palestine activist Bella Hadid; doe-eyed, introspective Gracie Abrams. The cigarette is no longer only the accessory of choice for “it girls” like Alexa Chung, whose aloofness has always been part of her brand, but for women as unmysterious as Kylie Jenner, posing with one on the cover Vanity Fair, and as commercially engineered as Sabrina Carpenter, who smokes them in music videos.
