Goodbye Wellness, Hello Cigarettes
Image Courtesy: Gianna Graziano
The clean girl era is slipping. The slick buns, the green juices, the obnoxious discipline, all fading. In their place, the bolder, more chaotic, messy party girl is back, and she’s bringing cigarettes with her.
Cigarettes are no longer something people hide. They’re something people hold proudly, with confidence. Styled into outfits, balanced between fingers, lit just long enough to be photographed. Once seen as a bad habit, now the most glamorous accessory.
Vapes are out. Cigarettes are in.
Image Courtesy: The Guardian
Not because people don’t know better, but because cigarettes look better. Because the messy party girl isn’t trying to be good. She’s trying to be effortlessly interesting.
Cigarettes photograph well. They add movement to an image. Smoke creates atmosphere. The gesture of lighting, exhaling, and tapping ash adds drama in a way no modern device ever could. A cigarette turns a still body into a scene.
Fashion has always loved props: bags, sunglasses, coffee cups. The cigarette has simply re-entered the rotation, this time as part of a larger rejection of perfection.
In street-style photos, on runways, and in paparazzi shots, cigarettes appear casually paired with tank tops, low-rise jeans, smudged eyeliner, and hair that looks slept-in. They soften polished outfits and sharpen messy ones. They make intention feel accidental.
Image Courtesy: Pinterest
The cigarette communicates something immediate: effortlessness, refusal, indifference. It suggests a life being lived rather than managed. Even when carefully styled, it reads as unstyled.
That contradiction is exactly why it works.
Vapes tried to replace cigarettes, but they never carried the same visual weight. They were colorful, techy, almost toy-like. A solution, not a statement. Vapes belonged to an era obsessed with optimization and self-improvement.
Cigarettes belong to spectacle.
They’re inefficient, inconvenient, and visibly bad for you. That’s what makes them feel transgressive again. In a culture saturated with wellness messaging, cigarettes stand out as rebellious. They symbolize a refusal to improve. A refusal to explain. A refusal to be clean.
And rebellion has become fashionable.
Cigarettes also tap into nostalgia. Models in the 90s. Backstage at fashion week. Dive bars, late nights, unfinished conversations. They reference a time when beauty felt less about perfection and more about danger.
Danger, even symbolic danger, reads as glamour.
The cigarette signals recklessness without requiring commitment. It’s a visual shorthand for chaos, risk, and emotional depth, whether or not any of those things are real.
What makes this moment different is how openly cigarettes are being aestheticized. They’re not a secret vice or a personal flaw. They’re placed deliberately in frames, leaned into as part of the look.
Smoking isn’t the point. Being seen smoking is.
The cigarette doesn’t say “I’m addicted.”
It says, “I’m interesting.”
It says, “I don’t care what you think.”
Even when that not-caring is perfectly curated and performative.
Cigarettes are back not because culture forgot they’re harmful, but because harm has become visually compelling again. When everything is clean, controlled, and “perfect”, the wrong thing stands out.
And right now, the wrong, messy, dangerous thing happens to look very fashionable.
Strike Out,
Writer: Garrett Di Scala
Editor: Daniela Mendoza
Graphic Designer: Gianna Graziano
Tallahassee