Models smoked at the LaQuan Smith and Christian Cowan shows. Presented during New York Fashion Week, the shows rhymed cigarettes with accessories. A scenography that raises questions.

Smoking seriously harms your health and that of your guests? Not for LaQuan Smith and Christian Cowan. The two designers presented their fall-winter 2024 collections at New York Fashion Week, which took place from February 9 to 14. Their models came forward, cigarettes in hand and unruly gaze. In the air – in addition to nicotine – there was a reminiscence of the 1990s and its top models and the life of jet-setters. Linda Evangelista for Mugler in 1990, Carla Bruni at Bluemarine in 1994, and even Kate Moss at Louis Vuitton in 2011: at the time, models dared to smoke cigarettes even on the catwalks, or in photographs. Today everyone is aware of the dangers of tobacco, and cigarettes are almost taboo. However, it seems that these smoky scenes are not yet relegated to the past.

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Swan woman

Christian Cowan dresses his models in suits and gives them a cigarette, as an accessory in its own right from his fall-winter 2024 collection. (New York, February 11, 2024.) Imaxtree

At Christian Cowan, the fashion show evoked the woman emerging from New York in the 1950s and 1960s. Worthy of being one of Truman Capote’s “swans”, these socialites New Yorkers from the late 1950s on which Ryan Murphy’s latest series is based, The Swans, she is fierce and sophisticated. In a pantsuit, asymmetrical caftan dress and tulle gloves, the models follow one another, glass of wine in hand or cigarette at the tip of their fingers. With their voluminous blow-drys and their disillusioned looks, they look like those women who went to dinner at The Basque Coast, French cuisine restaurant cherished by the high society of the sixties. Silhouettes modernized however by the length or length of certain pieces.

This glamorous aesthetic inevitably recalls a current trend: that of mob-wives, understand “mafioso’s wife”, which is panicking social networks. The embodiment of the liberated woman who fears neither her husband nor her enemies, she positions herself as the opposite of the servile wife, who is at once noisy, carnal and businesswomen. She wears furs and lipstick, walks in stilettos and… Smokes cigarettes, of course.

Read alsoFashion show – Christian Cowan – Ready to wear Fall-Winter 24-25

Alpha Woman

LaQuan Smith, for his fall-winter 2024 collection, opts for a lexical field of domination: latex, shirt collar and cigarettes. (New York, February 12, 2024.) Imaxtree

At LaQuan Smith, the theme is more dominatrix than cocktail. Latex replaces feathers, shirt collars dethrone sequins and the flesh is revealed a little more. The only points in common between the two parades: the colors (red and black), satin and tobacco. Here, only one model paraded with a cigarette, compared to five at Christian Cowan. According to the New York Post who spoke with Ohad Seroya, creative director of the clothing brand Rétrofête whose advertising campaigns contain cigarettes, the latter play a determining role in the conception of strong women. So those who wish to present a clothing collection dedicated to them sometimes require an explicit visual context. Like the cowboys by Pharrell Williams at Louis Vuitton, who this year transported bales of straw on wheelbarrows, or the Chanel vacationers who, on their artificial beach in 2018, carried their sandals in their hands, powerful women also sometimes need a strong sign to underline their character. Even if it means bordering on cliché.

Also read: The “mob wife” trend, this new “mafia boss’s wife” style that is attracting younger people on Tik Tok

A scenario that health experts also disapprove of questioned by the New York Post , at a time when smoking remains one of the leading causes of illness, disability and death in the United States. The program NYC Smoke Free estimated two years ago that 11% of New Yorkers smoked, including several thousand high school students. Despite their efforts and a danger that no longer needs to be proven, the cigarette still enjoys in art a glamorous, sexy and fashionable. In the cinema, she aestheticizese. On the catwalks, she accessorizes. As if in its smoke the ghost of a sex-symbol and not that of lung cancer.

In video, the mobwife trend which is invading social networks:

2024-02-19 17:27:48
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