On the meaning of cigarette smoking in fashion photography

Abstract

Smoking has become popular among women mainly since the 1920s Lucky Strike "Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet" campaign promoting cigarettes as a symbol of liberated, healthy and attractive woman. During the following decades, all cigarette brands used similar advertising strategies for attracting their customers, very often using celebrities in their advertisements and employing slogans describing cigarette smoking as a symbol of attractiveness, sex-appeal, success and even fitness and healthiness. Since the 1970s anti-smoking initiatives became successful in many countries all over the world leading to laws restricting the advertising of cigarettes on television, radio and in some cases even in printed magazines, newspapers and on billboards. Since 1990s many countries required to display a health warning on cigarette advertisements and adopted further laws restricting tobacco advertising and cigarette smoking itself. But despite this broad and robust anti-smoking campaigns, it seems that in the fashion industry, there is still a strong bias for depicting models while smoking cigarettes. The aim of the thesis is thus to analyze the work of three famous fashion photographers (Helmut Newton, Edward Steichen, Keith Trumbo), decipher meanings of cigarette smoking models in their photographs (fetishism, the liberation of women etc.), and trace, how (if at all) they have reflected anti-smoking campaigns. Photographs for the analysis will be selected mainly from the Vogue Archive.