Smoking Is Glamorous



Basically when smoking is portrayed as something stylish, or even sexy. Basically it's something The Beautiful Elite do.

Of course this was prevalent in old Hollywood, when Everybody Smokes, and since the actors were glamorous, it made smoking look like so. Although the main association today is The Vamp in a Film Noir movie smoking in a seductive manner.

Today, it's largely a Discredited Trope, with some exceptions.

This trope is often the basis of temptation for Sit Com teenagers to try/think about/start smoking. Peer pressure wouldn't work if the kids doing the pressuring didn't look cool or "glamorous", right? Usually a Very Special Episode, coupled with an Anvilicious lesson about the dangers of the tobacco habit.

Compare Smoking Is Cool (smoking as an indicator of a badass), Smoking Hot Sex.

Advertising

 * As in the picture, Up Marketing and Sex Sells were ways this trope was used.
 * An anti-smoking campaign used a poster with the phrase "Smoking Is Very Glamourous". The woman(?) in the picture was anything but.

Anime and Manga

 * Yuko of XXX Holic.
 * Shown in the One Piece manga (but not the anime) is that this was the main reason Sanji took up smoking at the age of nine. To be more cool and adult-like.
 * Hilariously enough, his mentor, Zeff, warned him it would kill his tastebuds. In the manga, anyway.

Comic Books

 * Millie the Model had a cover of Millie getting ready to do a huge marketing campaign for a cigarette company, and she then remembered she didn't smoke.

Film

 * Holly's cigarette stick in Breakfast At Tiffanys.
 * Ironically, this was supposed to be an affectation that Holly assumes to cover her insecurity. It backfired. Audiences didn't get it, probably at least in part because of the choice of Audrey Hepburn for the role.
 * In Thoroughly Modern Millie our heroine sees some Chinese prostitutes doing this, and attempts to mimic in an effort to blend in. Too bad she stinks at it.

Literature

 * Adora Belle Dearhart from the Discworld series. Moist finds himself quite attracted to what she does with a cigarette. (Others smoke, of course. But the smoking isn't seen the same way.)

Live Action TV

 * Full House Stephanie was in the bathroom with some other girls who were smoking and she thought it looked cool. She ultimately resisted though.
 * Rutland Weekend Television did it with the visuals that went along with Neil Innes' song 'Slaves of Freedom', with a bunch of people revelling in decadence, complete with David Battley getting a drag of a cigarette from a lightly-clad (read: Stripperific) woman.
 * In The Thick of It, Terri tries to invoke this when flirting with Peter Mannion, even though it's a Discredited Trope. Unfortunately for her, she's so inept, he doesn't notice. This is not surprising as Terri is inept at everything.

Theater

 * The Opera Carmen has a chorus of girls singing of the wonders of cigarette smoke. (Christopher Buckley's novel Thank You for Smoking quotes from it.) This almost made it into the Setting Update Carmen Jones before Oscar Hammerstein II decided to change the tobacco factory to a parachute factory.

Western Animation

 * Zig Zagged by South Park. The boys took up smoking not because it was cool, but because a school assembly did an excellent job of not smoking look extremely uncool.
 * The end had sort of an Aesop that, while smoking may or may not be cool, you shouldn't judge people for smoking, nor should you ban it, but simply leave them be.
 * The Simpsons where Lisa joins a ballet class and they all smoke.