Tobacco Chic: ‘Why is everyone smoking straights?’

July 21st - Written by Georgina Warburton

Drowned at the bottom of a wine glass and scattered across metropolitan tarmac lies the greatest guilty pleasure of all time. Marlboro’s gleaming ruby chevron may have left the middle pull-out of our magazines over twenty years ago, but it's fresh in my lungs from smoking whilst writing this. Undeniably, cigarettes have always been “cool” - in some romantic, hedonistic way, self-decay you can only afford when you’re young and reckless. Impotence, death, infertility, gum disease … these are simply things to consider later on, and the pressing reality that you need to be accepted into the college smoking area is a lot more critical. You have time, time to spend (allegedly eight minutes of your life per cigarette).  It feels like everybody's smoking again - perfectly appropriate for another burning summer spent on the edge of recession - and we just can’t help thinking about it a little too much. God knows nothing deemed cool is safe from analysis by 20-somethings. 

Walking the line between a bad habit and a sophisticated indulgence is the “straight” - tightly packed and jammed between two fingers, pulled between two lips, engaging every sense. Twenty of them are tucked away in a box emblazoned with imagery designed to sell the fantasy the furthest, namely Chesterfield’s sprawling blackletter and Sobraines' delicate embossing, or the sterile warning packaging post-2017 that just makes you feel a little edgier for willingly carrying around something with an impotence warning on it. That time you went to Europe, you got to look at all the colours and variations on display, and chose the pack that you believed represented you the best. What begins as simply recalling pre-ban flavours and indulging in the novelty abroad on a summer's evening, finds its way into your bag on the flight home, an unfinished pack of Vogues that begins a chain reaction. In typical youth-hedonist fashion, decades of restrictions on the advertisement and usage of tobacco could not touch the generation's ability to glamourise something so destructive. What else is keeping us so hooked?

Within the creative world, almost everyone smokes. Fashion, fine art, cooking, you can probably smell the damp tobacco from a mile off. It’s a networking tool; the smoking area becomes LinkedIn every club night, connections are forged, and projects are incepted. Outside becomes an opportunity to speak without strobes, the commotion of music, the stuffiness of four walls, to connect with strangers of varying degrees, made easy by a haze of Dutch courage and cigarette etiquette. It’s a well-known insider story that Kim Jones would scout interns while smoking outside at fashion parties - such occurrences haunt the ashed-out tarmac with a promise of something to be gained from following the crowd. Many venues are now enforcing the rule that if you are in the smoking area, you must be smoking, eliminating the place as a refuge from the club environment and cementing it as a retreat for people who have at least one thing in common. And so it is born, the social smoker. A lot of people fall victim to the label, and we are all in denial; “I’m not a true smoker, I only do it on nights out so I don’t see the need to buy rolling tobacco, a pack of straights will do me for the next couple of parties”. And so the cycle repeats.

There is nothing glamorous about the price tag on a pack of Marlboro Touch. The cashier says sixteen pounds and fifteen pence. I’m wincing, but he already scanned it, so it’s not like I’m asking him to get me some B&H blues instead. In a country on the verge of economic downturn, the first luxuries we are going to sacrifice are the ones we can actually live without. In desperate attempts to gain a sense of control amidst economic struggle, luxury fatalism is a reliable option. In our finite time and definite misery, why not do the things that make you happy? It’s an assured dopamine - every cigarette is the same, and it’s always a pleasure. The straight is less of a gamble than the roll-up, the semi-flaccid paper crumbling around the filter and begging for a re-light every two minutes lacks the seduction of such a put-together accessory, with a price tag on the rise, it feels as if I should be flaunting it. If I can be socially validated for my irresponsible purchase, it doesn’t seem like such a bad decision after all. 

Even the successes of JUUL and Elfbar can be attributed to their cigarette-esque look, closer in size and sleekness than those ugly box-shaped ones your uncle used to smoke in 2014, and possibly even worse for you than man's best friend, the tobacco leaf. Those menthol JUUL pods could’ve been the perfect storm - the hot minute it had a 72% US market share in 2018, for all that cooling vapour novelty would not survive against the fundamental truth that vaping is terminally uncool. Nonchalance about addiction is essential, and with their high nicotine content and lack of tar that lingers on the curtains, you can be sure that towards the end of that blue razz Elf bar, you’re going to be fumbling about in the pillows for it in the morning. If I don’t even have to get out of bed to get my first hit of nicotine, then truly I am playing with fire. At least with a cigarette, I am forced to feel the sun on my face, the breeze on my skin, the birds tweeting, and the heat emanating from the flame, etc... There is no camaraderie in electric cigarettes, no lighting/disposal ritual, nothing forged beyond the act worth a label like ‘social vaper’...

In light of recent turbulence in political spheres, it’s undeniable that we have seen the creep of alt-right ideologies, especially on platforms such as Musk’s ‘X’, which spills over into other visual-based platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. Where ‘X’ is a text-based hub for opinions to fester, the visual nature of the other platforms has blossomed into an obsession with self-image. Harking back to the adverts of the 90s, we see droves of wannabe tastemakers posing with a cigarette deftly poised in their hand, ready to inhale. There is something about the straight - a ‘rollie’ wouldn’t look the same in a photo, its not a statement, it’s everyday; But a straight is the last piece to an outfit, an accent, a display of flexible wealth, throwing caution to the wind (even if it is your own health you are rebelling against). The images often reference the 90s, considered the last true paradise of expression before late-stage capitalism purged originality and the ignorant bliss that allowed us to smoke like models and rock stars, and further beneath that, 1950s values. Traditional family ideologies are pushed online and have now become a silent trend, influencing our collective subconscious regardless of whether we agree. The 50s conjures images of the nuclear family, the housewife, and the breadwinner - an idea of material and marital success, through nothing but unbridled, pure hard work. The illusion of ‘The American Dream’ is something many still cling to, a pipe-dream that offers safety from the reality of economic decline, that can be consolidated with the same cigarettes that promised freedom and vitality, way back when.

Part of the beauty of society-wide habits is that everybody has a different story to tell of what led them to full nicotine addiction consolidated with straights. Though deeply personal, it will never be untouched by the swirling mess of trends around us that inevitably affect our behaviour. A lot of us smoked long before we ever reluctantly considered it a tool for our creative networking, and the creative industries are largely and thankfully not full of alt-right ‘X’-users touting trad values in the smoking area. Perhaps it's all pinned down to the fact that nicotine is just really addictive. But nothing ever exists on its own, and the more times you light a cigarette solely to remain in conversation with another, the more the dampened filter is passed between two lovers, and that one Steven Klein picture of Kate and Naomi smoking flashes briefly on your feed, the more we believe it. That is, the belief in a fantasy so visceral and achievable that it is worth sacrificing your health for. Decades of images haunt the act, all the chicness, rebellion, and glamour, traits assigned to you as you inhale, able to be used however you please, the reason it has become such a social tool, albeit a financially and physically harmful one. With government plans to phase out the sale of tobacco to anybody currently under the age of 15 forever, it may not be up to us as a generation to release the chokehold. Admitting we use these burning sticks for reasons beyond quenching withdrawal is the first step to change, if you believe anything needs to change at all. Many of us would be quite happy indulging in all aesthetic and social connotations until we do/don’t decide to quit. Consider it the tightly wrapped moral of the story - make sure your vices are yours to keep.