Degen Pener is the editor of Four Seasons magazine, a contributing writer for C Magazine and has written for the New York Times, Out, InStyle, The Hollywood Reporter, Entertainment Weekly, Elle, Details, Los Angeles magazine, Wallpaper, Veranda and New York.
All around Los Angeles — from industry parties to trendy clubs — cigarettes appear to be making their Hollywood comeback, despite decades of public health campaigns aimed at snubbing them out.
On March 23, the cast and creators of Love Story — chock full of scenes showing Carolyn Bessette (and less frequently, JFK Jr.) smoking back in the ’90s — celebrated the show’s success at the Chateau Marmont penthouse, where executive producer Ryan Murphy sat smiling next to Kaia Gerber, clad in a low-cut black dress with a cigarette held in her perfectly manicured hand.
A week earlier, the night before the Oscars, a writer who had just come from the Chanel and Charles Finch party at the Beverly Hills Hotel exclaimed, “Everyone was smoking there!”
And on a recent evening at private club The Living Room in Hollywood, cigarette smokers were scattered around the garden-like outdoor bar. No one appeared to bat an eye as they lit up.
Where there’s smoke, there’s smoking. A growing cohort of young celebs — from Heated Rivalry stars Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie to Addison Rae and I Love LA star-creator Rachel Sennott — have been photographed puffing at or holding old-school tobacco cigarettes, providing plenty of fodder for the Instagram account Cigfluencers, which chronicles famous contemporary smokers.
Fashion brands too are drawing on the history of cigarettes as a signifier of cool, at times even handing out smokes at events. At the launch party for Gwyneth Paltrow’s Gwyn last fall, ultra-skinny cigarettes were set out on little silver trays; a Khaite party at Dan Tana’s last November incorporated branded cigarette boxes aping classic Marlboros, and a Dôen benefit for Planned Parenthood (a health organization natch) at Mother Wolf in December featured cigs on tiered trays decorated with red bows.
Onscreen the habit is everywhere: One Battle After Another and Sinners both featured cigarettes (and cigars), as did several other Oscar best picture nominees. The nurses of The Pitt blow off steam with smoke breaks. Prime Video’s Scarpetta is set in two timelines — present day and the late ’90s — and characters puff like dragons in both of them. Last year, the anti-smoking group Truth Initiative found that on-screen depiction of tobacco increased for the first time since 2002, with smoking shown in 80 percent of the 2025 Oscar best picture nominees, including Anora and The Substance.
Magazines also promote butts as glamorous props, from Kylie Jenner on the cover of the latest Vanity Fair to Love Story star Paul Anthony Kelly and Sabrina Carpenter in Interview and Marty Supreme’s Odessa A’Zion in W. Last November, the fashion research firm Style Analytics reported a 70 percent year-over-year increase in U.S. searches for the term “smoking pose” among people aged 18 to 24 — a demographic that, until recently, had been defined by its move away from traditional cigarettes.
All of this comes at a time when smoking in the United States, at least according to official surveys, has plummeted to an historic low. Just 9.8 percent of Americans smoked in 2024, according to a report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, down from 10.8 percent the year before. By comparison, 24 percent of Americans smoked cigarettes in 1998.
What hasn’t changed: smoking’s lethality. According to the CDC, cigarette smoking causes about one of every five deaths in the United States each year — more than 480,000 deaths annually (including deaths from secondhand smoke).
Nonetheless, there’ve been a few hot takes lately on the apparent resurgence of cigarettes (see here, here and here), mostly musing on whether imagery of stars smoking will lead to rising rates among the gen pop. The conversation often circles a familiar question: Is culture driving behavior, or simply reflecting it? Of course, among those who work in and around the entertainment industry, celebrity rituals — from cosmetic procedures to juice cleanses — rub off even more readily. So it’s no surprise that as stars light up onscreen and IRL, Hollywood nightlife is starting to look a little hazier.
What’s largely been missing from the discourse is the perspective of smokers themselves. So I spent several nights out on the town talking to young smokers who work in the industry to hear how — and why — they’re picking up the habit.
Their reasons range from a desire to look cool and a love of the smoking aesthetic to the social aspect. Stress relief and rebellion, along with a growing distaste for vapes, are factors too.
‘It’s an Aesthetic Thing’
On a recent Friday night outside of Echo Park’s Taix restaurant (which closed on March 29 after 99 years in business), a trio of twentysomethings are puffing outside on the sidewalk. They’re happy to share their thoughts — but not their real names — for my article (all psuedonyms are asterisked). No one, it seems, wants to be the poster child of this reboot.
Cole* is a script coordinator. “I feel like I know more people who smoke cigarettes my age than who smoke weed, which is, like, crazy,” he tells me. Growing up in the South, he thought of smoking as “an older person thing,” and even back in college, around 2020, he recalls that seeing young people smoking was “very rare.”
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