Breakout TikTok starlet turned esoteric, Madonna-inspired pop sensation smokes two cigarettes in the music video for her single “Aquamarine.” While the video showcases strong references to Brittany Spears and “Eyes Wide Shut” set on the brick alleys of a generally European city, the cigarettes look as much like product placement as does bottle of Chanel No. 5. Rae might be the one singing “I’m not hiding anymore,” but is it Big Tobacco who is no longer hiding their recent attempts at celebrity cigarette endorsement? A dive into cigarette’s celebrity history and their reemergence into the mainstream may hold the answer.

Edward Bernays, public relations counsel for American Tobacco Company, when tasked with increasing Lucky Strike sales among woman, consulted his uncle Sigmund Freud who suggested working the castrated penis angle to shape stigma into a symbol of empowerment. A woman in charge smokes Lucky Strike. At the 1929 New York City Easter Parade, Bernays orchestrated a group of suffragettes (who came recommended to him from a girl friend at Vogue) to light cigarettes in front of photographers at the the head of the parade. With Bernays and these “torches of freedom,” marketing and consumerism became inseparable to the discourses and imagery surrounding the status of women in society. The “protest” set a precedent among women of privilege that uncritical access to certain aspects of male life is synonymous with gains in gender equality.

By the 1930s, women constituted 18% of cigarette sales, a 13% increase from before the “torches of freedom” campaign. The next phase sought to target women outside of the upper class through the use of celebrity endorsement. New advertisements focused primarily on the purported health benefits, but heavily emphasized a fixation on thinness and symbolic access to upper crest circles. This continued until Surgeon General Luther Terry released the 1964 public health advisory, “Smoking and Health,” detailing the harmful effects of tobacco usage and how the tobacco industry had purposefully obfuscated those effects. In the following months, regulations regarding the advertisement of tobacco products became mandated and celebrity endorsement of tobacco products became unlawful.

By 2019, anti-tobacco education is fundamental to our schools, the Victoria Secret’s Fashion Show is off the air, and Jia Tolentino publishes “Athleisure, barre, and kale: the tyranny of the ideal woman” with the byline “How we become suckers for the hard labor of self-optimization.” Detailing the history of various fitness classes and the many products and pricey lifestyle changes pushed upon women by social media and commercial advertising, her Guardian article is arguably the first comprehensive and public call out, outside of the art space, of self-optimization culture within our product regime and digital age.

The COVID-19 pandemic and shutdown of 2020-21 comes with it unlimited time for self-optimization among the non-essential worker class. Amazon profits surge 220% as a majority of American consumerism moves online. All possible discourse surrounding pressures for self-optimization is obliterated by an boredom and mass hypochondria that minimally concerned itself with the virus and hyper-focused on issues of mental, gut, and moral health. Products and consumption become not only openly related to better feelings but stronger virtue.

By 2022, American students have fully returned to their campuses, gatherings are back to a more forgiving public eye, and cigarettes are back to the mouths of women who should seemingly know better. Still of society’s upper echelon, the young women smokers of 2022 are educated, beautiful, and comfortable enough financially to take on the hobby. The growing plume of smoke engulfing these women carries with it two notes:

1. The American condition has become glaringly terminal and European traditions signal political and cultural enlightenment.
   

2. Developing a habit that destroys traditional beauty is a means of resisting pressures to age inconspicuously and maintain beauty while still benefiting from the worship of thinness and wealth embedded into cigarettes since their marketed conception.

We all felt the shift: the formation of a smoking elite who separates by means of shaming and excluding the health-anxious majority. To not smoke or not tolerate smoking is counter-revolutionary and anti-feminist. You may have seen this shift when the coolest people in your friend group began leaving the bar or club for large portions of time to stand outside and talk with each other about film, music, or maybe you over a shared cigarette. The patio becomes the inside of the party, an exclusionary space to those too anxious (or too eager) to cross over.

In following a Bernaysian strategy, Big Tobacco seizes upon the opportunity to boost cigarette sales by bridging the gap between the chic-woke and the general populous trapped between anti-nicotine education campaigns and the desperation evoked by vape culture by placing cigarettes between the fingers of the new generation of super-hotgirls. Unlike its PRedecessor, the psychoanalytic underpinning of this new era is not castration anxiety but rather the death drive. By triggering the element of the psyche that is compelled to repeat harmful behaviors to offset the fatigue of life, Big Tobacco identified this generation’s suffrage movement: addictive personality disorder brought on by screens and the existential threat of climate change and collapse of our major institutions.

Cut to Jenna Ortega getting papped smoking a cigarette in June of 2023. Even five years ago, the star of major young adult television show simply would not be seen smoking a cigarette. Nor would someone in Dua Lipa’s position who has a hit song in the Barbie (2023) movie and prominently features cigarettes in her Instagram photos. For the first time since the 1960s, it seems as though there is a force more powerful than the pressure for women in the public eye to be simultaneously sex icons, positive role models for young girls, apolitical, and morally sound. Could it possibly be a covert Big Tobacco operation to circumvent celebrity endorsement and advertising laws for nicotine and tobacco products?

Phillip Morris International and British American Tobacco in their two-year plan to firmly reinstate cigarettes back into the zeitgeist needed a soundtrack. Charli XCX’s sixth album “Brat,” an ode to reckless abandonment, the millennial condition, and a cheeky cigarette, goes beyond just the need for a smoking section outside the club (classic). XCX’s EDM-pop fusion not only lands among broader audiences than ever before, but it becomes a staple of corporate marketing during the summer of 2024. At first glance, “Brat” may seem like a natural companion to corporate culture because of its emphasis on not sleeping or eating, never going home, putting off life milestones to prioritize work, and recreational uppers abuse, but it appears that being a “Brat Company” involves embracing authenticity and fazing out fear of retribution from company culture.

Propelled by the commercial success of “Brat” and its integration into corporate marketing and presidential campaigns (“Kamala is Brat”), Big Tobacco parlays its success into the construction of its “every woman:” Addison Rae. In our previous examples of covert tobacco sponsorship, there has been no evidence of major aesthetic switch-ups or complete-180s of audience. Charli and Dua are European, Jenna Ortega was in A24 films before Netflix’s “Wednesday,” but Addison Rae was a freshman at Louisiana State University before being skyrocketed by algorithmic success on TikTok. Since 2019, she has moved from the Hype House, to Fallon, to brief Kardashian adjacency, to irrelevancy, and then to the biggest club record since Daft Punk’s “Random Access Memories.” Those who ask who Addison Rae hired to save herself from the pitfalls of social media burnout should look beyond the creative directors, stylists, and producers and towards Altria. This has happened before, and it’s happening again. The elusiveness of elitism, the effortless appearance of cool that is passed like/with archival fashion and museum memberships has become totally hackable, and it doesn’t require a skin care regimen or Hegel seminars or anything that might keep you healthier and able to face what’s ahead -- just a Marlboro.