Curious how a cigarette became a universal accessory in fashion?
You’re about to discover why a simple tobacco product evolved into one of the most influential style icons of the 20th century.
Let’s go
In this cigarette fashion history lesson, we’ll cover the journey of tobacco from taboo to trend. From glamorous Hollywood smoking scenes to high-fashion catwalks, cigarettes became powerful symbols of style, rebellion, and sophistication.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
- Taboo to Trend: Cigarettes Were Once Exclusive to Men
- Cigarette Glamour: Smoking On The Silver Screen
- Fashion Cigarettes: When Fashion Houses Joined The Party
- Advertising Revolution: Smoking As The New Fashion Accessory
- Influence on Modern Fashion & Legacy
Smoking Was Taboo for Women
In the early 1900s, women smoking in public was nearly taboo.
Taboos on women smoking were strong. In 1923, only 5% of all cigarettes were consumed by women and society did not approve of the practice at all.
But cultural winds were about to shift.
The 1920s were a cultural revolution for women. Suffragettes won voting rights, women joined the workforce, and social norms around gender and sexuality started to shift. Cigarettes became a way to visibly embody new freedoms.
By 1929, women’s cigarette consumption jumped to 12% in just six years. This was not just smoking — it was statement-making.
Want to know what made it REALLY skyrocket?
Fashion magazines and cigarette ads started showing beautiful women holding cigarettes. The iconic 1927 Marlboro ad campaign used the tagline “Mild as May” with a little red tip to match lipstick and nail polish colors.
The cigarette industry has continued to develop since that time, with products like these cigarettes in Canada changing over time to keep pace with modern health regulations.
Smoking on the Silver Screen
Hollywood made cigarettes into magic.
The 1930s and 1940s were the golden age of cigarette glamour in Hollywood movies. Every major star had a cigarette as an accessory: Bogart, Brando, Bacall, Davis, Hepburn, Dietrich…
It wasn’t just product placement, it was cultural conditioning. Hollywood and movie studios knew that audiences wanted to imitate the stars.
Cigarettes were props that could make characters look sophisticated, mysterious, and mature.
Check out these famous on-screen smoking scenes:
- Audrey Hepburn with a cigarette holder in Breakfast at Tiffany’s
- James Dean coolly lighting up
- Marlene Dietrich pouting with a cigarette
By 1950, over half of all men and a fifth of all women in the United States smoked cigarettes thanks to Hollywood glamorization. Smoking had been turned from a personal habit into a desirable fashion lifestyle.
Fashion Houses Joining The Party
Here’s one most people probably don’t know…
Major fashion houses began lending their names to cigarette brands. This wasn’t just a licensing deal, it was high fashion merging with tobacco.
The most successful and well-known example was Yves Saint Laurent cigarettes. Even though the famed fashion designer himself admitted to disliking the flavor of his brand of cigarettes, the link between the two was obvious.
Other names followed: Givenchy, Versace, Pierre Cardin, Christian Lacroix, Cartier, and more.
The idea of fashion cigarettes was a special cigarette that was longer and skinnier, more explicitly tied to an aspirational lifestyle than the regular brands.
The strategy here was elegant in its simplicity. Fashion brands earned new licensing revenue streams while tobacco companies could both upsell higher-priced prestige cigarettes and borrow cultural cachet from the fashion world.
The Marketing Revolution
The tobacco industry didn’t just advertise, they changed how marketing works.
Companies spent $8.2 billion on advertising and promotional expenses in 2019 alone. But the real revolution in marketing happened decades before, when they figured out how to make smoking fashionable.
Their secret sauce was connecting cigarettes to everything people wanted to be.
Sophisticated, independent, fashionable, modern, and rebellious. The aspired qualities to be human became the advertised qualities to have when smoking.
The “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet” slogan in 1928 was brilliant. It directly targeted women’s desires to be thin, glamorous and elegant by re-framing cigarettes as a fashion accessory to maintain a slim figure.
Virginia Slims would later take this to new heights with “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” connecting smoking with women’s empowerment and liberation.
Modern Influence and Legacy
Modern fashion still feels the imprint of the cigarette era.
While actual smoking rates have plunged dramatically due to health concerns now widely known since that time, the visual language of cigarette fashion endures. Fashion photographers continue to use the poses and gestures popularized by cigarette imagery.
The irony is clear.
While we now have education about health risks once unknown, the legacy of cigarettes in fashion history endures powerfully. The poses, the attitude, the look of sophistication and knowing edge still have influence.
Modern designers continue to reference cigarette culture via:
- Fashion shoots that visually reference 1940s and 1950s Hollywood glamour
- Accessories inspired by old cigarette lighters and cases
- Gestures, poses, and models that harken back to cigarette ads
- The continuing association between style and rebellion
Speed Learnings
In this history of cigarettes in fashion, we saw how marketing and cultural sway can shape entire industries. In just a few decades tobacco companies managed to turn cigarettes into a universal fashion symbol.
Key forces in this transformation were:
- Strategic alignment with women’s liberation
- Hollywood glamorization via celebrity culture
- High-fashion collaborations to add cultural prestige
- Revolutionary marketing connecting smoking to aspiration
This history shows us how products can become embedded cultural symbols by tapping into human desires for identity and self-expression.
Wrapping Up
The link between cigarettes and fashion created one of the 20th century’s most potent cultural forces. From flapper rebellions to elegant starlets in movies, cigarettes became more than products — they became a language of style communicating independence and cultural identity.
While modern health awareness has shifted how we relate to tobacco, the aesthetic and cultural legacy is still intriguing. The methods pioneered to market cigarettes as fashion accessories revolutionized the advertising industry and continue to shape product positioning today.
Learning this history helps us understand how deeply marketing, lifestyle, and fashion have become interwoven — and how potent the right cultural moment can be in turning any product into an iconic symbol.