In the new romantic dramedy “Materialists,” about 21st-century dating, Dakota Johnson loves cigarettes.
Playing Lucy, a New York matchmaker, she’s puffing when she gossips with a pal during a work party. Later, she holds a lighted cigarette near her face while flirting with an ex. There’s no hand-wringing over her smoking. She’s just a smoker. And she’s wildly on trend. That’s because, at least in the world of entertainment, cigarettes are once again cool.
“Materialists” is just the tip of the ash. The musicians Addison Rae and Lorde both mention smoking in recent singles. The stars of “The Bear” are smokers on- and offscreen. The “Housewives” count many among their ranks. Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd smoke in the big-screen comedy “Friendship,” while the chic Seema (Sarita Choudhury) on the series “And Just Like That” does as well. In the kitschy video for her track “Manchild” Sabrina Carpenter uses a fork as a cigarette holder. Even Beyoncé has lit up onstage during her Cowboy Carter Tour. In one instance, she throws the cigarette on a piano, which artfully ignites as she performs “Ya Ya.” If Beyoncé is doing it, you know it’s reached the upper echelon of culture.
And these smokers are largely celebrated. The overwhelming sentiment is: Sure, cigarettes are bad for you, but they make you look good — as evidenced by Lucy, who keeps her smokes in an elegant silver case, perhaps to emphasize how sleek the habit is, and brandishes them to show just how effortlessly hot she can look bringing one to her lips.
Jared Oviatt, the man behind the Instagram account @Cigfluencers, which features photos of celebrities glamorously smoking, told me he had noticed an upswing in material recently. When he started the account in 2021 he had to look harder to find content.
“In the early days I was really dipping into the archives,” he said. “There weren’t a lot of new examples.” Now, he said, “every week there’s at least one or two people where I’m like, ‘OK, that’s new.’”
Oviatt started @Cigfluencers, which has more than 68,000 followers, after coming across an image of Dua Lipa mid-puff. “I was like, ‘That is so crazy that this gorgeous woman that is a household name is so openly smoking cigs on her IG grid,’” he said. While Oviatt is a casual smoker — not “Post Malone-level multiple packs a day” — he said the appeal of a famous person smoking boils down to aesthetics.
“That general star power makes it that much cooler,” he said, noting that these people don’t seem to care whether their teeth or hands are damaged from the tobacco.
Cigarettes can also be evocative for other reasons. In the Rae and Lorde singles, there’s a wistfulness to smoking. For “Headphones On,” Rae sings, “Guess I gotta accept the pain / Need a cigarette to make me feel better.” The beat is jaunty, but the words are melancholic. A cigarette is a chic way to deal with existential angst.
The same goes for Lorde’s “What Was That.” She’s reminiscing about a past relationship when she and her partner took MDMA and kissed for hours. “I remember saying then, ‘This is the best cigarette of my life,’” she sings. “Well, I want you just like that.”
Lorde enjoyed that cigarette, but it also reminds her of the past.
Both Lorde and Rae have worked with the singer whom Oviatt credits with the smoking revival: Charli XCX, the Brat Summer pioneer who is a proud smoker. She even once received a bouquet of cigs for her birthday from Rosalía, another notable smoker. (The bouquet evoked the bowls of cigarettes Mary-Kate Olsen reportedly set out at her 2015 wedding to Olivier Sarkozy, a subversive, very French detail.)
Charli’s personal brand has been wrapped up in a hedonism mixed with nihilism that is in keeping with smoking. In Charli Land you party now, think about the consequences later or possibly never. For someone like Rae, who was once a squeaky clean online personality known for TikTok dances, aligning herself with Charli, and highlighting her cigarette habit, is a way to break free of her bubble gum persona.
These smokers also stand in contrast to the celebrities who flaunt their healthy lifestyles and hawk wellness treatments or Erewhon smoothies. Oviatt said the celebrities can rationalize the habit: “‘If I smoke and I look bad, well, just in 10 years I can get a face lift to reverse the effects of smoking,’” Oviatt said.
That mentality is in keeping with the “ciggy mommy” aesthetic popularized by the reality star and podcaster Gabby Windey, who became a fan favorite on the latest season of “The Traitors.” Windey has explained that her oversized sunglasses have gotten her branded with the moniker “cigarette mom,” which has little to do with actually smoking cigarettes or being a mom. Instead, it means she just looks like a parent who takes puffs out of exhaustion. But she has embraced the title, inventing what she calls a “ciggy mommy cabinet.” Her vice president, secretary and treasurer are all members of the “Real Housewives” franchise.
Does Windey’s hilarious stream-of-consciousness logic totally track? No. Does it make sense on a cosmic level? Yes. A ciggy mommy embodies the modern idea of a smoker: Someone with a dose of hedonistic nonchalance who is also a little bit over everything going on in the world. (Windey went viral for a monologue about being “lethargic.”)
These pop-culture smokers are aware that the habit is not good for you. With period dramas that feature copious smoking — even recent ones like “The Brutalist,” in which Adrien Brody nearly always has a lighted cigarette between his lips — viewers experience a dash of irony. After all, those characters don’t have the knowledge of the health risks that we do now. In “The Bear” or “Materialists,” that is not the case.
No one, for instance, would think of the tortured chef Carmy Berzatto on “The Bear” as a model of good health, mental or otherwise. Still, the actor Jeremy Allen White uses Carmy’s cigarettes as a way to both emphasize his appeal — those arms sure are on display — and his sadness.
Lucy in Celine Song’s “Materialists” also has a hole in her heart that smoking fills. She works for wealthy clients, trying to make them feel good about themselves, even as she’s wise to the ways the dating market is unfair. Her cigarette is a symbol of her jadedness. But it also represents something powerful for Lucy. It gives her an edge that she can wield in her interactions.
Power is also what Beyoncé projects when she lights up onstage during “Ya Ya,” a song in which she proclaims, “I just wanna shake my ass” even as she pointedly critiques the American dream. And perhaps that’s the ultimate reason for the cigarette revival: A desire to burn it down, lungs and all.
