There is an argument running through the culture right now, and the strange part is that both sides are winning.
One side says the cigarette is back. Not as a habit, as a symbol: on the runways, in the music videos, on the beauty packaging, a backlash against a decade of wellness. The other side, mostly people younger than me, says that is nonsense, that nobody their age actually smokes. “Gen Z does smoke.” “I’m Gen Z and I smoke.”
Here is the thing. They are both right. And the gap between them is the whole story.
The habit is dying. The image is not.
Start with the behavior, because the behavior is almost gone. In 2024, 1.4 percent of American middle and high school students reported smoking cigarettes. That is the lowest number ever recorded. In the late 1990s, it was more than a third of teenagers. The habit did not decline. It collapsed inside one generation.
The commenters are not wrong, though, because nicotine did not die. It moved. Vaping sits at 5.9 percent and pouches are climbing. So when someone says Gen Z still smokes, they are right about the drug. They are just wrong about the object. The drug went to the most convenient possible delivery device. The cigarette got left behind.
And while the cigarette was being abandoned as a habit, look what happened to it as an image. Searches for the “ciggy aesthetic” have surged. “Smoking pose” is up 70 percent among 18 to 24 year olds. Eight of the ten Best Picture nominees at this year’s Oscars feature tobacco on screen, the first increase since 2020. An entire pop aesthetic got built around a paparazzi photo of a singer with a cigarette.
So here is the one line that matters. The cigarette is having a renaissance as an image at the exact moment it is dying as a habit. That is not a coincidence. That is the mechanism.
I do this for a living
I recognized the move immediately, because I make it every shift.
I am a sommelier. I taste dozens of wines a week and I swallow almost none of them. I spit. On purpose, in front of people, as the job. I have spent years separating the knowledge of a wine from the drinking of it, holding the substance in my mouth precisely so I never have to consume it. Tasting and spitting is the cigarette trend performed by a human being. The ritual, kept. The substance, declined.
Once you have lived inside that split, you see it everywhere, and you understand why it works.
A symbol is only powerful when the behavior behind it is rare. When everyone smoked, a cigarette said nothing. It was wallpaper. Now that almost no one does, the same object says something loud: I am secure enough to court a little ruin, to visibly opt out of the optimized life everyone else is performing. The image did not get potent in spite of the habit dying. It got potent because the habit died. Scarcity is the entire engine of meaning. Anyone who sells wine could have told you that.
Why the vape will never have a runway
This is also why the vape will never get a fashion moment, no matter how many it sells.
The vape is the optimized product. Convenient, current, consumed, everywhere. And optimized things cannot be status symbols, because status was never about what you use. It is about what you can afford to refuse. The vape is the habit. The cigarette is the language. Only one of them photographs, and it is the one nobody needs anymore.
The bottle is already doing this
I watch the same thing every night on the floor, and it has nothing to do with tobacco.
The most photographed object in a dining room is the bottle. Most of those photos are taken before anyone has tasted a drop, sometimes before the cork is even out. The label is the message. The wine is almost incidental. People are not always drinking the bottle. A lot of the time, they are wearing it.
Grower Champagne runs on the same current. Its power is legible scarcity: a name almost no one recognizes, a place you have to earn your way into, a story that does not fit on a billboard. The famous houses sell recognition. The growers sell the opposite, and the opposite is the flex now.
And then there is the part that should interest anyone in my business most. The fastest growing thing at the bar is the drink with the alcohol taken out. People are ordering the ritual without the substance: the coupe, the bitterness, the garnish, the ceremony, none of the intoxication. That is the cigarette trend, in a glass. The symbol, kept. The habit, declined. I have been the living version of this for over a year, and the culture is finally catching up to the bar.
What the brands are getting wrong
So when a brand stitches a cigarette onto its packaging or sends one down a runway, it is reading the trend and missing the mechanism.
The signal was never the cigarette. The signal is three things: legible scarcity, analog texture, and a little transgression. Copy the cigarette literally and you inherit the regulation, the ethics, and the health math, and you get none of the meaning. Copy the variables instead and you can build the same feeling out of almost anything that is rare, physical, and slightly against the rules. A wax seal. A handwritten list. A rotary phone. A wine nobody at the table can pronounce.
The oldest lesson on the floor
The cigarette is not actually coming back. The behavior is gone, it is not returning, and that is a good thing. What came back is the oldest lesson in hospitality, the one a sommelier learns on the first day and a sober one learns twice.
The most powerful thing in the room is the thing you hold and choose not to use.
Tasted, never swallowed. Turns out that was never only about wine.
Woody
What’s the object you hold and never use, the one that says more empty than full? Reply and tell me. I read everything.