Fashion Of Smoking Essay

The Fashion of Smoking and The “Look” We Get

For the 19 years, I have been alive, I have been around more “no smoking signs” than see people smoking. However, my mother and grandmother would disagree with me on that statement when they were growing up. This is because the look of smoking changed, it was no longer considered a cool and hip thing to do. Looking back at the history of smoking and why so many people smoked is an interesting process because a lot of it was due to “looking cool”. Smoking became a fashion. Nothing was more hip than having your hair permed, your leather jacket and pants on, and a cigarette hanging out of your mouth. Movies, television, ads and the media showed the classiest and coolest women smoking and that made it cool. I would relate it to teenage drinking in the media right now. I cannot turn on a television without …show more content…
For a while it seemed like the negatives of cigarettes were not being taken seriously, however, people slowly realized all the precautions that were being made to stop tobacco distribution and production. The Surgeon General Report of 1988 states that “Many children and adolescents who are experimenting with cigarettes and other forms of tobacco state that they do not intend to use tobacco in later years. They are unaware of, or underestimate, the strength of tobacco addiction” (vi). The report then goes on to talk about how they need to educate the public, but especially the adolescents because they have been exposed at such a young age and were always taught that it was okay and the social norm. Again, I can tie this to today 's problem of alcohol with teenagers. Many times I have heard kids say, “everyone is doing it” and talk about how underage drinking is the new thing because that’s all they have grown up around, and that is exactly what teenagers were saying when smoking was the big