What started as &ldquo;torches of freedom&rdquo; has now become, almost, an homage to the fashion industry itself.&nbsp;

With It girls like Hailey Bieber and Kylie Jenner posing with cigarettes on glossy magazine covers once again, one question lingers: When did smoking become fashion&rsquo;s favorite accessory again&mdash;or did it ever really leave?
Let's take a look back at the history of cigarettes, specifically, women smoking them in fashionable settings.
Women smoking became socially acceptable in the 1920s. Cigarettes are renamed &ldquo;torches of freedom,&rdquo; and suddenly the act is no longer about actually smoking, but about being seen, being free, being outside of control&mdash;female empowerment. Flappers owned it. And at the center of that world, Coco Chanel&mdash;smoking not as rebellion&mdash;but as identity.

Femme fatales shift the narrative. Cigarettes become sexy, slow, mysterious. The act of smoking, a performance, a seductive act of inhaling and exhaling. A cinematic pause that controlled the handling of a cigarette with such delicateness and sensuality between their fingers, and wore it as an accessory. This was Old Hollywood.
The 1990s stripped it all back. Cigarettes everywhere, but devoid of glamour, they lost their theatricality and became something colder, more indifferent. Backstage, runways, editorials. Kate Moss as the cult leader of heroin chic and its total indifference by them. Mario Testino, behind the lens, surrounded by the world of Karl Lagerfeld, cigarettes became the ultimate&nbsp;je ne sais quoi. Not styled, just there.

Cinema never lets them die either. Characters like Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City made cigarettes part of identity, in the same way Sarah Pidgeon performatively used them when portraying CBK in Ryan Murphy&rsquo;s latest hit 2026 series, Love Story.&nbsp;
And now? They&rsquo;re back. Not as a habit. As an image.
Cigarettes have always existed as more than themselves&mdash;extensions of the self, a charged, dangerous, sexy symbolism. And fashion has always been their highest bidder.
The high fashion industry has very high barriers to entry, even for celebrities and respected actors. Hollywood has always tried to break in: pulling from the archives, partnering with A-list stylists, wearing looks straight off the catwalk, showing up front row whenever status and schedule allow, etc.
So the cigarette becomes something else. A shortcut to that world. A visual code.
Celebrities don&rsquo;t just smoke&mdash;they use cigarettes. As the atmosphere. As an attitude. As a glamorous added layer to the look. An image-driven choice rather than a habit of dependency. This &ldquo;marker of cool&rdquo; has been quietly having a comeback for years. Lana Del Rey incorporates them into her visuals not as addiction, but as part of her identity&mdash;symbolic, romantic motifs. She presents self-destruction as beautiful. Poetic, indeed. Charli XCX subtly nods to those original &ldquo;torches of freedom" by including them in her &ldquo;Brat&rdquo; aesthetic.

Cigarettes aren&rsquo;t just appearing&mdash;they are being placed, editorialized and framed. In the past three months alone, multiple luxe fashion magazine covers featuring your favorite It girls have brought them back into focus.
And why is that? The &ldquo;clean girl&rdquo; of 2026 is shifting&mdash;still polished, still intentional, but increasingly drawn to the allure of the unvarnished, the appeal of being perceived as the mysterious cool girl. It is not about being perfectly in control anymore, but about presenting a carefully curated image of the undone. Most &ldquo;effortless&rdquo; cool girls; The Olsen twins, Lily-Rose Depp, Dua Lipa, Bella Hadid... Different aesthetics, common denominator: the cigarette.

Cigarettes as an accessory, are part of your persona for that night, a marker of cool. An additional element added to an image&ndash;in editorial&ndash;essentially provides another layer of coolness, as well as volume, dimension, and a certain playfulness. An attention grabber that, as a result, makes you stare at an image or someone longer.
&nbsp;Cigarettes, as an act, are something else entirely. They are an added performance; an additional gesture built into the look, based around sophistication and intention, where the movement itself carries meaning. It&rsquo;s not just what it adds visually, but what it recreates historically - bringing back flapper freedom, Old Hollywood nostalgia, and that unreplicable 90s it-girl energy all at once.
&nbsp;Despite countless, and entirely truthful, warnings and evidence about their harmful nature, humans remain creatures of habit, drawn to the familiar and the romanticized. With smoking, of course, comes a paradox of desire: the very awareness that something is harmful heightens its appeal. Cigarettes are no exception. Their danger has, in many ways, become part of their mystique, intensifying their attraction rather than diminishing it.

kate moss cigarette 2002

The allure continues to lie in the contradiction; something so closely tied to rebellion and nonchalance, yet positioned against industries perceived as rigid, exclusive, and difficult to penetrate. It creates what feels like an &ldquo;attainable luxury&rdquo;, the illusion of access to a world otherwise out of reach. The $13 matcha, an overpriced workout class, even the cigarette itself - all become symbols of a curated, accessible indulgence. Not true luxury, but its aesthetic echo.
The beauty industry, ever attuned to cultural shifts, has subtly absorbed this language. Fragrance and makeup increasingly nod to the sensuality and edge associated with smoking: Guerlain&rsquo;s Tobacco Honey evokes warmth and decadence, Mary Phillips&rsquo; viral &ldquo;Lip Ciggys&rdquo; blur the line between object and beauty accessory, while Chanel Beauty&rsquo;s signature gold smokey eye embodies that Parisian ease.

Ultimately, what emerges is less about cigarettes themselves and more about the visual codes they carry. And when a cigarette appears on a magazine cover, it rarely reads as literal. Instead, it taps into that deeper cultural memory. That same rebellious flapper spirit is revived, resurfacing more than a century on.
&nbsp;The cigarette girl is back&mdash;though arguably, has she ever really left, or has she simply been reinventing herself this whole time?

Are Cigarettes Back in Fashion?

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