Why the young and cool are taking up smoking

Smoking, if you haven’t noticed, is suddenly cool again.

‘Is smoking making a comeback?’, fretted the Guardian last week. In the paper’s characteristically joyless tone, it reported that models at a recent runway event in Norway had strutted the catwalk cigarette-in-hand. We also learn that there’s even a popular Instagram page called ‘Cigfluencer’, which is dedicated to sharing photographs of the rich and famous having a cheeky toke. The Bear star Jeremy Allen White, pop sensations Dua Lipa and Charli XCX, and fashion model Bella Hadid are some of the A-listers who have recently been papped fag in hand – all people in their twenties or early thirties who ought to know better, in the Guardian’s eyes.

When walking the streets of a city like London, it’s hard not to get the impression that the humble dart is enjoying a comeback among the youth. You can see the evidence for yourself at almost every pub or café: hordes of young people lighting up like it’s the Sixties and dressing like the Nineties. Smoking is what Gen Z might call a ‘vibe’.

While rates of smoking are in decline overall, there is clearly a stubborn proportion of the population who remain determined to enjoy this increasingly persecuted habit. According to the latest data from the Office for National Statistics, about 13 per cent of Britain’s adult population still smoke. The age group with the highest percentage of smokers is 25- to 34-year-olds.

For the metropolitan elites, the idea that cigarettes might be chic again is a horrifying development. Such people view smoking as dirty, bad for your health and, of course, distinctly working class. Disobeying the diktats of the nanny state is supposed to be a sign of limited intelligence. So how could young people – usually venerated as a generation of enlightened activists – be so ‘backward’ in their attitudes to smoking?

If smoking is enjoying a small uptick among the young, then good. Younger generations have mostly shown themselves to be worryingly subservient to every ‘progressive’ trend under the Sun, particularly in matters of health. This, you could argue, hasn’t done them any good. Young people are chronically anxious, depressed and overmedicated. They are also so notoriously fragile that most of them believe certain books should come with content warnings, if not be banned altogether. Could the embrace of smoking be generation snowflake’s first flicker of independence from establishment orthodoxy?

Certainly, the coolness of cigarettes is a rebuke to the governments and health bureaucracies who see it as their right to meddle in every aspect of the modern individual’s life. After decades of state-sponsored public-health campaigns, extortionate tax hikes and disincentives like ‘plain packaging’ – if you can call those grotesque olive green packets with images of diseased lungs ‘plain’ – there are still more than six million Britons lighting up on a fairly regular basis. Personally, I suspect the real figure might be higher. We all know people who, when asked if they are a ‘smoker’ by a pollster, would say no, but would likely still pinch a few cigs from a friend or a Good Samaritan after their first drink on a Friday night.

That younger generations are continuing to smoke is no reason to panic. Our parents and grandparents smoked at levels that will never be surpassed. Society didn’t fall into a heap. They even managed to do things like build roads, railways, schools and hospitals we still use, produce great books and paintings, develop the modern welfare state and win wars against fascism (real fascism, not pronoun violations). So much of that was achieved with a cigarette hanging from their lips.

It also seems natural that people will, at some point, start to push back against the relentless attempts to sanitise every aspect of modern existence. Not everyone thinks their health is the be all and end all. A society comprised of smug fitness freaks isn’t everyone’s idea of paradise. Even as the government turns the screw on smokers, is everyone in, say, Hull, where nearly 20 per cent of the population smoke, going to ditch their cigs and suddenly take up yoga, jogging and meditation instead? Don’t be silly.

The revival of smoking hardly makes up for the multitude of sins younger generations seem determined to inflict on the rest of society. But it’s a welcome sign of a resistance nonetheless – and no less welcome for being so completely unexpected.

Hugo Timms is an intern at spiked.