They can ban smoking. They probably should. But no one can pretend

Today is the firstday of the rest of your smoke-free life - hurrah! Before you started reading this, the Smoking in Public Places ban came into force. You know what you have to do: drop that Marlboro Light, lady. Step right away from the fag-packet. Raise both (empty) hands. You know it's not clever, it's not glamorous and it's not fashionable.

Oh, but it was, all of these, it was. Soooo glamorous. Marlene Dietrich made smoking look like sex: when she exhaled and said, "It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily", you could feel more than pulses stirring. In the climactic scene in Now, Voyager, Bette Davis (committed smoker) turns down smoothie Paul Henreid (committed smoker) with the tremulous words: "Oh, Jerry, don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars." He bites his lip. He utters the (now) unbelievable words: "Well, let's have a cigarette on that, shall we?" Taps his pack. Puts two in his mouth. Lights them both and passes one to her. She sucks it in. Audience fans itself down. I know I'm talking last-century black-and-white, but every noir movie ever made or remade relies on fag-end cool. And Uma Thurman smoked for America in Pulp Fiction.

Smoking became fashionable between the two World Wars for a certain set of women: the rich, racy, upper-class girls whose beaux drove Bugattis and whose brothers smoked imported Turkish tobacco. Women wanted a bit of that raciness for themselves. The thing about mass fashion trends is that they're always, always driven by younger men. Women believe it's us who drive fashion: it never is. It's always young men with enough money to spend who are the early- adopters of any newly invented widget, social trend or interweb thingy. Women, even feisty, go-getting, driven young women, are not innovators. We are copiers, imitators, mirrors. What is a "must- have" fashion item? It's something a mass of women have seen on somebody else, ie Kate Moss. She's got it, they want it, shops run out of it. So it goes.

Having started smoking, women continued. When Dior's New Look frocks were launched in the freezing February of 1947, the first model came out in an hourglass costume with 12 yards of fabric in it. When she twirled, to display the lavish silk-satin lining, she knocked the ash off the cigarettes in the front row. Fashionistas smoked as much as they do now, but they were allowed to do it in the salons then. Ashtrays full of cigarette butts slicked with Revlon's Love That Red! were a must-have in any smart restaurant. In l949, Vogue wrote about the new chic in handbags: tiny, chic, sleek, only just big enough to contain "a pigskin cigarette case, silver Dunhill cigarette lighter, cigarette holder with gold trumpet," plus opera- glasses, a hanky and your keys.

Smoking for women reached its peak in the late 1960s, when the guys at Philip Morris sniffed the whiff of "women's liberation". They launched Virginia Slims ("slimmer than the FAT cigarettes men smoke"), and marketed them assiduously towards the aspirant baby- boomers who were looking for glass ceilings to break. The ads showed Edwardian women looking miserable in corsets next to Sixties babes looking fab and freedom-loving in groovy miniskirts. The slogan purred: "You've Come a Long Way, Baby." So women who wanted to storm the men's rooms (those "smoke-filled rooms" where Old White Males took all the decisions) could now go armed, with fag in hand. They could spark up, stare everyone down and say: "So is that a yes or a no?"

Men (the fashion-conscious smartypants) had already started giving up by the time women peaked. They're obviously quicker at reading health warnings than we are, too. So I'm here to tell you that the last people left hacking themselves to death will be women. Long after men had moved into fashionable meerschaum choices, it was old gipsy women who still smoked clay pipes. The last people reportedly taking snuff (SNUFF!) in England were the old crones in Lark Rise to Candleford - half a century after men had passed on snuff-taking (it dirtied one's shirt-front so).

I've done five B&Hs writing this already. Dying for another. If lung cancer doesn't get me before next week's column, it'll only be because I'm slavishly channelling Ron the builder who props up the bar in the village pub. He's an early-adopter. His new toy is a ciggie-alike nicotine-inhalant tube. He says it works. "I'm doin' it for me, mind - not the bloody Whitehall smokin' police." His toy is sleek, white, slim, well-designed. A fashion must-have. I have to buy one.

I can't get Lily Allen out of my head, and not because she's another addict ("I wish I didn't smoke so many cigarettes", in "Cheryl Tweedy"). I just like her filthy language, and the warbling choruses about the love-rat boyfriend from last summer's "Smile". It's not Janis Joplin doing "Ball and Chain", but it's nice. She whistled bits of "Smile" at Glasto "spookily well" said one reviewer. She did a very grown-up "Heart of Glass" too.