|
UK > History > 2011 > Health (I)
Why is
smoking back in fashion?
When Kate
Moss lit up
as she walked down the catwalk
during Paris Fashion Week,
it
instantly sparked a media controversy.
Here, our tobacco devotee asks why,
despite all the dire health warnings,
fashion is falling back in love with
smoking
Sunday 3
April 2011
Euan Ferguson
The Observer
This article appeared on p26 of the Observer Magazine section of the Observer on
Sunday 3 April 2011.
It was published on guardian.co.uk at 00.04 BST
on Sunday 3 April 2011.
Most
people, even non-smokers, have their favourite smoking moments from films. Well,
maybe not the most rabid anti-smokers, but those people probably don't even have
a favourite film, unless it's something safely dire, like Beaches. There, I've
declared my credentials. I am a smoker: not a proud smoker, but certainly
proudly anti rabid-anti-smoking and its tyrannies: denials of choice and of
personal responsibility. Anyway, my own favourite is not a style moment, not a
macho moment, but a logic moment, from 1997's oddly underrated Love and Death on
Long IslandΊ .
Grumpy NY cabbie, to passenger John Hurt, playing the filthily English Giles
De'Ath: "The sign says 'No smoking'."
Hurt (smoking. Languidly and stylishly but, somehow, with fury): "No. The sign
says 'Thank you for not smoking'. As I am smoking, I don't expect to be
thanked."
And how we, or at least I and the then love of my life, smiled. At last, the
passive-aggressive mimsiness of that cutely conspiratorial little phrase hey
guy, let's build a happier, cleaner world, and most passengers don't smoke, and
I am utterly aware that your not-smoking is a physical wrench for you, not a
whimsical choice, but I wrote the damn sign polite, so up yours, buddy had
been demolished by dry Englishness.
And how impossible to smile now, just 14 years later. There are signs, tiny
signs, of a last hurrah for the coolness of the cigarette, most recently in the
fashion world: but it's not just that the health argument roundly (and rightly)
won the day, the vaulting change in societal attitudes means it's probably a
doomed battle. John Hurt would be drenched in opprobrium, sprinklers and
spittle, even especially the interestingly phlegmed stuff from
fellow-smokers. It's just not done, today. Wit and smoking, style and smoking,
bars and smoking, jazz and smoking, films and smoking, sex and smoking, cool and
smoking. The last Bond to smoke on screen was in 1989. British commercial TV
currently runs ads featuring "bad boy" Iggy Pop looking half-naked, wrinkled,
druggy and bedraggled and with a quite unaccountable latex dwarf-druggy-dipso
mini-me version of himself, doing bad fast crazy loud things in cars. But
superbad Mr Pop would not be allowed, of course, to smoke. Since the start of
the new millennium, especially since the rolling smoking ban throughout the UK,
a sea-change has occurred. Even smokers don't like other smokers breaking the
rules.
Sit in a pub or dodgy restaurant today and watch someone light up inside near
the doors, and the nostrils flaring will be those of fellow-smokers, like
Dracula scenting garlic, and the denouements scarcely less bloody. Put a living,
polluting smoker on TV, an advert, a council promo, the cover of this magazine,
an anything, and they'll be as welcome as a streaker at Queen Victoria's
funeral. And, my God, we certainly can't have it properly advertised,
aspirational, appetising, sexy.
Which is why it was intriguing to pick up the latest edition of Love magazine, a
week after Kate Moss deliberately smoked on the catwalk (on National No Smoking
Day). The two are not unrelated.
Love is an impossibly stylish biannual fashion magazine, edited and styled by
the rather fabulous Katie Grand, who also styled/ran the Louis Vuitton catwalk
Kate-smoke show. Her mag is shudderingly chic. Weighty. Every model, every
advert featuring a model, has a face that could launch a thousand ships; but a
well-flung copy of Love could sink half the same fleet. Honestly, it's heavy.
And, in this unusual issue of Love, there are more than a dozen shots of models
smoking. Mostly smoking rather well. Old-style. Sexy. (Wisps of blue-blue smoke
escape, like half-remembered perfume-ghosts. The thin white dukes of paper jut
from lips, from long fingers, promising intention. Much is intensely sexy.
But is this our last hope? Given even professional smokers musicians, writers,
drunks have kowtowed into out-of-door pariahship and showed not even a throaty
croak of dissent, is this our last hope for cool? The beginning of the lung
goodbye? A faintly awkward catwalk stunt, and a bog-blocking fashion magazine?
"Christ, no. Smoking will always be cool. On paper. In fashion. In photos. But
it's always been like that," purrs I did hesitate to use the word, but she is
just so French Valentine Fillol Cordier, a catwalk model at 17 and now a
rollickingly successful stylist.
"Fashion loves to go back, to reference itself. And smoking helps: it says
history, and style, and it works well for what it says in two dimensions. It's a
bit dreamy, a bit intellectual, it gets smoky and it fills the screen. But it's
in films, in stills, in photos, in something that happened before. It's in two
dimensions. That's what we love. In all dimensions, in real life, well
you
know, it actually stinks. It smells. And it kills. I was a smoker, hell yes.
When I was a model and the people who have a go at models who smoke, well, it
kept our weight down. But it has always been far more cool on the screen than in
real life. It just works better there."
There is an echo of her words when I speak to Harriet Quick, fashion features
director at Vogue. "Oh, it's just fashion. Fashion loves to do this, to provoke.
It's not really saying anything. But, yes, there's something about smoking which
works wonderfully well on the screen or the photo. It fills the screen, gives
impact. Just doesn't work that well in real life."
It was, actually, always so. Always since cigarettes and cameras coincided. The
Hollywood stars who promoted cigarettes, and were paid handsomely or prettily to
so do, mostly didn't smoke. John Wayne spent the last part of his life making
anti-smoking adverts, to counter the earlier pro-smoking adverts which had
helped get him the money to get the cigarettes to get the cancer which killed
him. Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Betty Grable all
appeared in newspaper ads (Lucky Strike, Old Gold, Chesterfield and Camel
) but
few smoked, even fewer smoked the featured brands. Even even fewer towards their
ends.
Because it does kill. Valentine and Harriet are far from alone in telling me
that, while they like to/may have liked to smoke, once, it is now a bugger,
frankly, to get away with.
"I think it's age, yes," says Harriet. "As people, friends, grow a bit older,
they have children and suddenly it is, frankly, just not done to ever smoke.
Probably quite right."
Valentine, with a little more French expansion, tells me that "things are
changing. It is better that we realise the lumps in the lungs, so horrid. I just
wish it wasn't."
Valentine calls me back an hour later to remind me that Lady Gaga had a week
earlier gone down the Thierry Mugler catwalk at some Paris show with a nicely
smouldering cigarette. Gaga, Mugler, Iggy. I have written all these words with
a) a lack of appreciation for the talent involved; b) a mild worry that I
possess this information; c) a less-mild terror that I have just died and been
reborn and am saying German babywords. Still, this learning curve is fun, and I
have suddenly realised that it's so much more fun than a website called
"Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada". Could there be any more bad words crammed
into one sentence?
Which leads me ineluctably to the governmental strategies. Designed by people
who don't smoke. I can't really put it better than my colleague Victoria Coren,
who recently said in the Observer's comment pages: "The idea is that hiding
cigarettes in plain boxes, then hiding the boxes under the counter, will stop
children wanting them. That is an excellent idea. Unless you've ever actually
met any children."
Smoking is, essentially and no one, certainly not folk who don't smoke, can
take this away great in the imaginarium. It fills the screen. It gives poise,
balance, pause, thought. Authors, photographers, directors love their characters
to smoke. Especially crime authors. It gives their guys something to do when
they can't pull out a gun, which certainly helps in Britain. But I digress, and
so I eagerly answer the call from Maggi Hambling, the fabulous artist and grand
smoker, although I'm told she quit five years ago.
"Yes. I did. But I started again the Thursday before last. I have to tell you
cigarettes have never tasted better!"
Maggi, helpfully, wanders deeply complicit into my burgeoning theory that
smoking is Grand on screen, Crap in life. "Absolutely. On screen, in a portrait,
it fills the corners. And the glamour, the wisps, the formality, the romance!" I
ask her a little about her friend George Melly, thinking what jazz may have been
like without cigarettes.
"Well, it wouldn't have existed. I painted George for the two years after he
died. And each time with a glass of whisky and a cigarette. Otherwise it
wouldn't have been true!"
So: smoking grand on screen, on stage, crap in life? Maggi, rather
unhelpfully, delights me. "Fuck no. I don't even go out to a dinner party unless
there's a guaranteed ashtray. I hate anti-smokers. I did three, three,
sculptures of Oscar Wilde. Bronze, steel and then hardened steel. In each case
some lunatic anti-smoker managed to saw the cigarette off the end of the hand.
The last one must have taken a real effort. What kind of chuff would summon that
effort?", except she doesn't say chuff.
It stinks, smoking. There are many websites to tell you as much. If you're a
non-smoker, you'll nod along with it. If you are a smoker, you'll nod along with
it. Here's the difference: we smokers understand your concerns and anger, and
increasingly try not to provoke. You fabulously fail to even entertain the idea
of our addiction, and constantly attempt to find new ways to provoke, and ban,
because now you can.
And, no, it doesn't make you cool. It makes you addicted. Your teeth stain and
fall out. Your lungs stain and fall out. Barack Obama just about got away with
it, because it revealed a charming human weakness. Nick Clegg didn't, on Desert
Island Discs, because at that stage we didn't need him to reveal weakness but
backbone (and, by the way, he's a complete pussy when it comes to smoking. I
rather like the man, still, but he actually said "hardcore", quite possibly with
an exclamation, when I offered him a B&H during the last election campaign).
But that's life, and indeed death, and what we're meant to be talking about here
is art, or at least styling, and expression: 2D smoking, images of smoking .
Wispy, ethereal, perfumed smoking, through a glass smokily. And keep the windows
closed. Sculptures should be allowed to hold cigarettes. Paintings should be
allowed to contain cigarettes. Photographs should, surely, be allowed to portray
cigarettes. Theatres, too. In all cases, the fourth wall protects us. From the
smoke, definitely, if not from certain strangely unbusy editors and Mumsnet
contributors. It's an image, a representation do with it what your brain will
allow.
Smoking doesn't make you cool. It doesn't make you clever. Actually, scratch
that last: it does, a bit. Here are three differing quotes. "Smoking kills. If
you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life," said Brooke
Shields a while back. On Thursday, a rather lovely woman from ASH (I had
expected some drippy doomglut naysayer) said to me, "It's not illegal, models
smoking, it's down to them," which made me cheer inwardly, and then she ballsed
it up by adding, "but they are role models, which makes it disappointing." No,
they're models.
And then there's Bill Hicks, the late US comic. "The worst kind of non-smokers
are the ones that come up to you and cough. That's pretty fucking cruel, isn't
it? Do you go up to cripples and dance?"
Not dancing, Bill. None of us addicts are dancing. But we can tell the many
differences between a seriously sexy picture and a seriously advanced lung
tumour. That's our dance.
Why is smoking back in fashion?, O, 3.4.2011,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/apr/03/smoking-health
Teenager
uses Human Rights Act
to sue
health authority over vital growth drugs
Fifteen-year-old with rare condition makes legal history
in bid to force Derbyshire primary care trust to pay for his medicine
Jamie
Doward
Guardian.co.uk
Saturday 2 April 2011
20.29 BST
This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 20.29 BST on Saturday 2 April
2011.
A version appeared on p10 of the Main section section of the Observer
on Sunday 3 April 2011.
A
15-year-old boy who suffers from a rare medical condition that means he cannot
eat protein is to make legal history by becoming the first child to sue his
local health authority under the Human Rights Act.
The boy's lawyers claim that he will suffer both physical and mental retardation
at a critical time in his adolescent development unless Derbyshire primary care
trust agrees to fund a drug that helps him consume a normal diet.
The boy, who is referred to as NL, is said by his solicitor to be half the
weight of normal children because of his condition, phenylketonuria, or PKU.
The rare condition affects one in 15,000 people, making it difficult for them to
produce an enzyme that breaks down the protein found in meat, chicken, fish,
eggs, nuts and cheese. It is sometimes fatal.
Derbyshire PCT has refused to pay for the boy to receive Kuvan, a drug that can
alleviate the condition and costs £30,000 a year, on the grounds that he is not
an exceptional case and there are alternatives available such as a synthetic
food diet.
The case, one of the first to invoke the Human Rights Act against a PCT, is
highly unusual because the claim against the PCT is being made under article
six, the right to a fair trial, and article eight, respect for family life.
The boy's lawyers claim article six is relevant because of the way in which the
PCT reached a decision not to fund the drug. They also say the boy's mother has
had to give up her job because of the stress on the family, while his two
younger brothers have suffered because his poor diet has left him often
short-tempered, indicating that a claim under article eight is also valid.
His family has raised sufficient funds to pay for a one-year course of Kuvan,
but they say their resources have now run out. The boy's father, Max, said his
son may soon have to return to a synthetic diet that he has refused to eat in
the past, leaving him prone to malnutrition.
Since the boy started taking the drug, which is widely available in other EU
countries, he has made a dramatic improvement, according to his family and
experts at Birmingham children's hospital who have observed him.
The boy has been able to eat small amounts of protein about a third of a
normal child's intake, which is equivalent to a bowl of cereal a day without
milk. He has gained weight as a result. His father said the family was not
asking the PCT to supply the drug indefinitely, but for the next three years,
during which time the increased protein intake could help NL with his adolescent
growth spurt.
"We have pretty much spent our life savings," Max said. "We are down to selling
our house to continue. If not, I've got to put my son through more pain by
taking him off the drug."
He said that since NL had been on the drug it was "like having a different son.
His whole character has changed. He's less angry, easier to deal with, far more
tolerant, more relaxed, more humorous, his confidence has improved and he's more
able to concentrate."
Oliver Wright, of MPH solicitors who are acting on behalf of NL, said: "The PCT
said we couldn't prove that it works and that it only works for one in four
people with the condition. Well, my client has paid for it for a year and shown
it works. He's put on weight, he's grown, he's happier."
The PCT, which declined to comment, was preparing to fight the case in court
after proceedings were issued against it in February. However, after a series of
legal wrangles, it has now referred a decision to its specialist individual
funding request panel. If the panel declines to approve funding, the boy's
lawyers will seek a judicial review into how the PCT reached its original
decision.
The case is being studied closely by medical lawyers. Experts predict an
increasing number of patients will use the Human Rights Act to demand access to
expensive drugs and surgery. This week the High Court is expected to deliver its
verdict in the case of Tom Condliff, a diabetic who says he will die within a
year if Staffordshire primary care trust refuses to pay £5,500 for him to have a
gastric bypass.
His legal team has argued that without the operation there is a significant
chance he will lose some of his limbs, making the cost of caring for him far
outweigh that of the operation. But lawyers for Staffordshire PCT have said that
National Institute of Clinical Excellence (Nice) guidelines make it clear that
he does not qualify for surgery in his current condition.
The case is the first to have been brought under the Human Rights Act against a
PCT, with Condliff's legal team arguing that, under article two, the
Staffordshire trust must respect their client's right to life. If it is
successful, similar applications are expected to be made at many of the UK's 159
PCTs.
Teenager uses Human Rights Act to sue health authority
over vital growth drugs,
G, 2.4.2011,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2011/apr/02/phenyl
ketonuria-human-rights-act-derbyshire-pct
|
