Tobacco.org

• Cigarette push stubbed out 

CIGARETTE giant Imperial Tobacco has dramatically pulled its products from Adelaide fashion stores after the brazen tactic to ensnare young smokers was exposed.

In what has been labelled a "grovelling backdown", the tobacco company announced it would have all cigarettes out of boutiques by January 31.

It also denied that its own promotional material suggested smoking was safe and cool.

Last week, the Sunday Mail revealed Imperial Tobacco was pushing its Peter Stuyvesant brand through high-end fashion stores and even a city hairdresser.

A week of dramatic fall-out following the Sunday Mail's investigation included:

AN admission by the tobacco company that "no cigarette is safe".

A PUSH for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to investigate the company over its marketing campaign.

A STATE Government move to make selling cigarettes in fashion stores illegal.

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• Imperial Tobacco offers cash incentives for fashion outlets to sell Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes  

CIGARETTES are being sold at high-end clothing stores and hair salons, in a "tricky and desperate" tactic to lure new young smokers.

A Sunday Mail investigation has discovered smoke company Imperial Tobacco is lavishing trendy Adelaide stores with cash incentives and corporate entertainment in return for stocking Peter Stuyvesant brand cigarettes in specially designed cigarette dispensers.

Marketing kits distributed by the tobacco giant to fashion retailers describe cigarettes as being safe and fashionable: "It used to be extremely dangerous. Now the only danger is you're not the coolest cat on the block."

The tobacco giant's targeting of fashion-savvy outlets to push the trendy brand has prompted calls for a State Government crackdown to ban the practice. . . .

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In the wake of the Sunday Mail investigation, SA Substance Abuse Minister Jane Lomax-Smith ordered a report into the laws on the sale of cigarettes through these outlets.

The investigation discovered:

CASH incentives of up to $2000 a year are offered to stores agreeing to sell cigarettes.

SMOKING is promoted as safe and cool in literature given to targeted fashion outlets.

FREE cigarettes are handed out to stockists.

BOOZY lunches and even a swish cruise have been held for businesses which sell the brand.

The Sunday Mail has confirmed at least six hip outlets - including Glenelg clothing store Zero, city boutique Whistles and CBD hair salon Gang - have started stocking the cigarettes, nicknamed "Stuyvies".

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It used to be extremely dangerous. Now the only danger is you're not the coolest cat on the block.
Marketing kits distributed to fashion outlets in Australia by Imperial Tobacco.

• Smokin' style: Designs for puffin' and chillin' on New York sidewalks 

It's terrible for your health and makes people near you flee. But even frightful weather can't keep New Yorkers who crave a cigarette from hitting the streets, plastering themselves into corners and under overhangs or scouring the city for a spot the weather can't quite reach. Last week alone, smokers braved ice, wind and rain for a nip of nicotine. The result: some pretty crazy outfits. . . .

We commissioned three designers to create a happy medium. Chris Han used smoke as the inspiration for her charcoal-hued ensemble. Bling-friendly downtown team Phillipe and David Blond created a corseted climate-control body suit. Stylist Kendall Sparks sketched stiletto Wellington boots with built-in ashtrays.

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• Bohemian Hermes 

Gypsies and luxury don't seem like the likeliest of couples, but they teamed up brilliantly at the latest collection by Hermes, a tour de force by the label's designer Jean-Paul Gaultier.

Staged Saturday on a Slavonic carpet and with Romany music gurgling out of the soundtrack, the show featured a marriage of haute gamme hippie and the unique ability of the Hermes atelier to create products of exceptional quality. . . .

Gaultier's vision of Hermes is very much uptown, but not uptight - one model even walked down the catwalk clutching a lit cigarette, which is possibly illegal under new French anti-smoking laws, but looked just right.

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• POPE: Hot, Maybe, but Not Smoking  

A few months ago, I wrote an article criticizing the reality series starring supermodel Tyra Banks because it often showed beautiful, skinny women puffing away on cigarettes.

The program is watched by high numbers of preteen and adolescent girls, including my daughter. Regular exposure to smoking on television and in movies increases a child's risk for trying cigarettes and becoming a smoker, studies show. . . .

Last night, thankfully, things did change: America's next top models became America’s next nonsmokers. . . .

“So many young girls are fans of America’s Next Top Model, and right now so many young girls are fans of you. If they see their idol puffing and smoking a cigarette, what does that make them think? Wow, she's smoking, that's cool. So that's why smoking will be banned. It's over.''

The lecture came after an odd segment in which the girls were photographed holding cigarettes in glamorous poses. But then some startling graphics reflected the damage of smoking. The girls were shown coughing up blood, with facial tumors or tracheotomy holes in their necks, bald from chemotherapy and wrinkled from premature aging.

It seemed over-the-top to me, but then my daughter asked, with a look of disgust, “Can all that really happen to you if you smoke? All these things?’’

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• Tobacco-Free Kids Applauds Tyra Banks for Exposing the Ugly Truth About Smoking 

The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids applauds Tyra Banks and her television show “America’s Next Top Model” for exposing the ugly truth that smoking is not only dangerous to health, there is also nothing glamorous about it. Last week’s season premiere of “America’s Next Top Model” featured a photo shoot that depicted the harmful effects of smoking, including premature aging and other negative effects on appearance and health. In a welcome change from past seasons in which contestants have been shown smoking, Tyra Banks called on contestants to be role models for young girls by not smoking on the show and seeking to quit. . . .

Tyra Banks’ example could not be timelier as the R.J. Reynolds’ tobacco company is stepping up efforts to market the company’s new Camel No. 9 cigarettes to women and girls by linking it to fashion and beauty. RJR’s latest magazine ads for Camel No. 9 feature vintage fashion and appeals to “the most fashion forward woman.” The ads offer a version of Camel No. 9 “in stiletto.”

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• Still Too Thin, and Getting Younger  

Not the first time 5- or 6-year-olds had been seen on a catwalk, the Heatherette show was, however, a first for showcasing girls just barely past "Dora the Explorer" age doing credible impersonations of the runway siren Carmen Kass. . . .

The one thing you will never hear anyone utter a peep of concern about when it comes to models is smoking. Yet it’s pretty common knowledge that they smoke more than long-haul truckers, road workers or Sylvia Sidney in “Beetlejuice.” The blue-collar reference here is intentional since, despite its putative glamour, a modeling gig is more like that of a supermarket checker than one would imagine. Both draw on a work force that tends to be uneducated and young. . . .

No matter where, fashion-show readying areas all seem subject to local fire-safety standards, which designers observe by posting No Smoking signs prominently above the communal ashtray. Models smoke every place and all the time, in a nimbus of backstage hairspray, in alleyways at the rare shows (Prada, Bottega Veneta) whose designers won’t permit smoking indoors. They smoke at smart fashion parties and in the little Smart cars their agencies use to ferry them from one casting to the next. They smoke in a number of surprisingly tolerant restaurants here, of course, because the maître d’ has not been born who would tell the gorgeously sultry 18-year-old Australian Catherine McNeil to stamp out her cigarette.

Of course, little of this would be anybody’s business but that of the persons involved were it not that so few of them are voting-age adults. Models are called models for a reason. Ask one of the 5-year-olds from Heatherette. . . .

If people didn’t look to models or celebrities for behavioral cues, Hollywood would not currently be looking at banning cigarette smoking in movies or treating it as grounds for a ratings change. Hollywood probably knows what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention knows and also what the researchers at the University of Florida in Gainesville recently found in a study released last month that established a connection between dieting, smoking and drug use.

After analyzing the dieting and smoking practices of 8,000 adolescents, the study found that, particularly among girls, dieting seemed to lead to smoking and for reasons any model could explain: nicotine suppresses the appetite. . . .

It happens that there’s a sinister circularity in this process. Killing appetite is one reason people reach for a Marlboro. And there is no question that dieting is an occupational necessity for the girls paid to make the refined but punishingly slim clothes that Raf Simons showed in his much-lauded Jil Sander show on Tuesday (brave and courageous were words that were used a lot) look chic and also humanly feasible to wear.

It is also true that smoking to lose weight only leads to more smoking. Or at least that is what animal studies linking food deprivation to the use of stimulants have found. When the fashion community is used to its next fit of moral dudgeon and wakes up again to the problems of underweight girls and the largely hidden abuse of things like clenbuterol, it will be worth reminding them that there is good science demonstrating that when you starve an animal, you make it a lot more vulnerable to self-abuse.

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• Pols protest tobacco ads in women's mags 

Dozens of members of Congress are urging women's magazines like Cosmopolitan, Vogue and Glamour to stop accepting tobacco ads, saying such ads threaten the health of the teenagers and young women who form a large part of their readership.

In a letter sent Tuesday to 11 publications, the 41 lawmakers, led by Rep. Lois Capps, D-Calif., said it was ironic that tobacco ads appear in the same pages as articles on women's health.

The Congress members said they were particularly concerned by ads for Camel No. 9, the smartly packaged new cigarette by R.J. Reynolds which has been heavily marketed to women. "To our great concern, R.J. Reynolds is heavily relying on leading women's magazines, including yours, to aggressively market this deadly product to young women, including teenagers," they wrote. The letter was released to the media on Wednesday.

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[A]s a nurse, a mother and a grandmother, I am very concerned about popular women's magazines accepting the advertising dollars of cigarette manufacturers and turning a blind eye towards the deadly effect these cigarettes have on women.
Rep. Lois Capps,(D-CA), in a letter sent Tuesday to 11 women's magazines--including Cosmopolitan, Vogue and Glamour-- on behalf of 41 lawmakers.

• Fashion Mags Anger Some With Tobacco Ads 

Not long ago, fax machines and e-mail inboxes at Vogue, the world's premier fashion magazine, were briefly assaulted with thousands of angry letters. Not about the latest gorgeously photographed fashion trends or beauty products in its influential pages, but about a single, colorful ad: for Camel No. 9 cigarettes.

"If you draw income from the advertisement of tobacco," Heidi Thompson of Freeport, Ill., wrote in one letter, "you are as guilty as big tobacco companies in selling the health and future of so many of our youth in order to pad your bank accounts."

The letters were part of a grass roots campaign by an anti-smoking group to get Vogue to drop ads for the new, prettily packaged Camels, which they and others feel are targeted to younger women and teenagers.

But it isn't just Vogue. Pick up nearly any fashion magazine this month -- Glamour, Harper's Bazaar, Lucky -- and you'll see a colorful cigarette ad mixed in with articles on beauty, fitness, nutrition and glowing skin.

You won't find them in a number of other countries. . . .

"Research out there shows that young people are susceptible to advertising," says Ellen Vargyas, counsel for the American Legacy Foundation . . .

The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids says volunteers around the country sent Vogue more than 8,000 protest e-mails or faxes earlier this month. It says it got no response, other than a couple of scribbled notes faxed back on letters that had been addressed to editor Anna Wintour. "Will you stop? You're killing trees!" read one note shown to The AP. . . .

A number of magazines refuse to accept tobacco ads: just a few are Men's Health, Self, and Money, according to a list provided by the Tobacco-Free Periodicals Project.

But most fashion magazines do.

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• Outrage at 'complimentary' cigarette party 

A FASHION industry party at which patrons were given packets of free cigarettes and encouraged to smoke is being investigated by the Health Department.

Guests at the swanky Fashion TV Red Ribbon Foundation party at the Sydney Opera House forecourt marquee on Thursday night were given "complimentary" packets of Davidoff cigarettes by scantily dressed promotional girls.

The preview party to Australian Fashion Week was branded a "disgrace" by anti-smoking campaigners, who accused the fashion industry of glamourising a deadly habit.

"It's a disgraceful state of affairs when free cigarettes are given out at any event," Australian Medical Association president Mukesh Haikerwal said.

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• Outrage at 'complimentary' cigarette party 

A FASHION industry party at which patrons were given packets of free cigarettes and encouraged to smoke is being investigated by the Health Department.

Guests at the swanky Fashion TV Red Ribbon Foundation party at the Sydney Opera House forecourt marquee on Thursday night were given "complimentary" packets of Davidoff cigarettes by scantily dressed promotional girls.

The preview party to Australian Fashion Week was branded a "disgrace" by anti-smoking campaigners, who accused the fashion industry of glamourising a deadly habit.

"It's a disgraceful state of affairs when free cigarettes are given out at any event," Australian Medical Association president Mukesh Haikerwal said.

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• Fashion Designers Issue Model Guidelines 

The American fashion industry says it wants models to be healthy, not anorexic, bulimic or chain-smokers. And to help them achieve that, the Council of Fashion Designers of America has released a list of recommendations as part of a new health initiative.

The guidelines were issued Friday, three weeks before designers start showcasing their fall collections during New York Fashion Week, which starts Feb. 2. The guidelines, which are suggestions and not binding, include: . . .

- Develop workshops on the causes and effects of eating disorders, and raise awareness of the effects of smoking and tobacco-related disease.

- During fashion shows, provide healthy meals and snacks, while prohibiting smoking and alcohol.

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• Kate's caught taking illegal substance on stage.....a cigarette 

Kate Moss faces prosecution again. Not for snorting cocaine (allegedly) but for puffing on a cigarette.

She was caught on camera flouting Ireland's strict smoking ban at a concert where her boyfriend Pete Doherty was performing with his band Babyshambles.

The supermodel, wearing the skimpiest of black dresses, was singing on stage with Doherty when she took conspicuous puffs on a cigarette which was dangling in her hand. Doherty was also seen to be smoking constantly throughout the gig at the Music Factory, in Carlow, Co Carlow. . . .

Moss, 32, now faces a 3,000 euro fine — about £2,000 — for what would appear to be a violation of Ireland's smoking ban, which came into effect in March 2004.

Not that a successful prosecution is guaranteed. The last time Moss was caught misbehaving on camera — apparently snorting cocaine during a Babyshambles studio recording session — she subsequently escaped charges.

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• Fashion Week: Tracy Reese Uses Fashion To Fight Smoking 

It may not be the most chic habit, but outside the tents at Fall Fashion Week, smoking still seems to be one of the most dominant trends. That's why in addition to her spring fashion collection, designer Tracy Reese is looking to make a statement in other areas. For this year's Fall Fashion Week she's teamed up with the anti-smoking group, American Legacy to encourage more people in the industry to stop using cigarettes as one of their top accessories.

“You don't need to smoke, especially in the fashion industry,” says Reese. “It's so prevalent among models, designers, students – it's just everywhere. I think people think they’re cool or they are filling those empty spaces with a cigarette and it's not cool if you're killing yourself and you're making second-hand smoke for others. And I just think there's a better way to express yourself and to really be beautiful than picking up a cigarette.”

“In this industry, which is such a wonderful part of New York, the whole glamour fashion industry too many times people use the cigarette as a symbol of glamour and high style and fashion and Tracey and the Legacy Foundation is trying to dissuade people from doing that,” says American Legacy Foundation executive vice president Bernadette Toomey.

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• Cuban designers honor island's tobacco tradition in fashion show 

  Cuban models twirled turquoise ribbons and flaunted papier-mâché tops on Wednesday in a fashion show that paid homage to the art behind Cuba's long tobacco tradition.

  Designs inspired by Cuban cigar labels ranged from earthy to extravagant, seductive to serene in the "Art and Fashion" show, which aimed to blur the line between the two. . . .

  "This provides hope that art and fashion can coexist," Mendez said. "It also tries to keep alive other Cuban traditions, of our tailors, artisans and makeup artists."

  The show was sponsored by UNESCO as part of a weeklong series of events in Havana honoring cultural diversity.

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