Is smoking ‘cool’ again? Why cigarettes have been dominating on our screens and catwalks

Of all the fashion trends to make a comeback, cigarettes were an unlikely contender. After all, it’s 2024. A year when you can’t go 10 minutes on a night out without smelling the saccharine scent of someone’s neon-pink vape. A year when a packet of Marlboro Golds comes covered in photos of rotting teeth and costs £15. A year when asking someone for a lighter is less of a come-on than it is a cry for help.

And yet, this is the year that has That’s how it seems, anyway, if you take a look at recent . Consider the catwalks at earlier this month, where cigarettes were so present at shows that attendees began to wonder whether health experts had ruled that actually smoking good for you and that had U-turned on decades of legislation banning