Cigarettes Are Back on the Menu
As drink garnishes, party favors, and decor.
In the 1941 hosting manual, Entertaining Is Fun!, midcentury interior decorator and tastemaker Dorothy Draper provides hosts with a checklist to run through before guests start trickling in. Place foreign magazines around the living room as conversation starters. Make sure the curtains are drawn “to give the room the feeling of being well enclosed against the night.” And very importantly, make sure there are plenty of clean ashtrays, cigarettes, and matches everywhere.
In the 85 years since Draper dropped this wisdom, cigarettes have been swept out of restaurants, bars, workplaces, and most homes. Decades of public health messaging about the detrimental effects of nicotine kind of worked. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine this year shows that cigarette smoking rates in the US have reached an all-time low.
Whether it’s for reasons of irony, nostalgia, or dead-eyed nihilism, cigarettes are invited to the party again.
