NEED TO KNOW
- Celebrities are smoking publicly again, breaking decades of Hollywood taboo.
- It reflects a rebellion against “optimisation culture.”
- Over-regulation may be driving the pushback.
Celebrities are smoking cigarettes again — brazenly, in public, and even in high-profile ad campaigns. But before we rush to cancel them, it might be worth looking at the bigger picture. Or even in the mirror.
Everywhere we look right now, cigarette smoking is having a moment in pop culture. Kylie Jenner has appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair with a cigarette in hand. Grace Van Patten and Jackson White have been photographed together, cigarettes in hand. At Charli XCX and George Daniel’s wedding, personalised matchboxes were part of the decor.
It’s an image we associate with the 90s and early 2000s, before Hollywood largely stubbed out cigarettes on screen and off once the disastrous health impacts loomed too large to ignore.
Now, smoking is very much back, and in a strikingly unapologetic way.
So, why? Why has it suddenly become socially acceptable, even fashionable, to see a celebrity smoking?
Brand expert and culture commentator Eugene Healey and demographer Simon Kuestenmacher told WHO that it’s a sign of the times.
Celebrities don’t lead culture, they reflect it
The answer has less to do with the cigarettes themselves, and more to do with the times we’re living in.
“The celebrities reflect the culture. They do not lead the culture,” Eugene explained to WHO. He argued the resurgence has roots in something far bigger than a fashion cycle: the growing difficulty of everyday life for young people.
“This whole thing is coming from the fact that it is getting incredibly hard for young people to live. That is the real issue. It’s not just like Kylie Jenner smoking a cigarette… They are trying to reflect the zeitgeist, the spirit of the time, which is again a rejection of optimisation culture.”
The backlash against ‘optimising’ everything
For years, the cultural conversation has centred on self-improvement: optimising our sleep, our diet, our morning routines, our productivity. But somewhere along the way, that promise of a better life started to ring hollow.
It’s hard to ignore the existential dread simmering beneath the surface of modern life right now.
Distrust in institutions, financial instability and environmental anxiety have left many people disillusioned with the idea that discipline and optimisation are the answer to everything. So the pendulum has swung the other way.
“A cigarette is a perfect rejection of that mantra because it is like pure self-destruction represented symbolically,” Eugene said.
Smoking, undeniably bad for your health, has become an unlikely symbol of rebellion against a culture that promised control and delivered burnout instead.
Over-regulation has left many without a way to ‘vent’
There’s also a broader argument about regulation itself, with Simon Kuestenmacher explaining that people do need methods of letting off steam.
“From a health perspective, you shouldn’t smoke. From a health perspective, you shouldn’t drink,” he said. However, as governments “over-regulate” things, it can do the opposite of the desired impact.
“And that, in a sense, takes away a certain kind of vent that you have in the culture.”
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He explained only one-third of the Australian population smoke legal cigarettes, meaning two-thirds currently buy illegal ones.
The over-regulation of the products has resulted in illegal cigarettes flooding the market, and these are often at a cheaper price point.
In other words: when every outlet for indulgence, imperfection or rebellion gets flagged, filtered or regulated, something has to give.
Where do we go from here?
Celebrities are smoking again, and increasingly, so is the general public.
Whether this is a genuine cultural shift or a passing act of defiance remains to be seen.
But one thing is clear: the return of the cigarette says less about nostalgia for a bygone era and more about how we’re coping with this one.
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