For something that is so short-lived, a cigar requires an awful lot of work.
There is the box, the humidor, the cutter, the lighter, the slow ritual of lighting it, the post-dinner cognac – and, of course, the cigar itself, which will eventually burn down to nothing. Yet for something designed to disappear within an hour or two, the cigar has proved remarkably enduring.
They are smoked by presidents and movie stars, appear in paintings and advertising campaigns, travel through fashion and fine dining, and remain a familiar shorthand for wealth and sophistication long after many of the surrounding social conventions have disappeared.
For Aaron ‘Sig’ Sigmond, who has spent more than 30 years writing about cigars, this longevity is precisely what makes them so fascinating. His new book, Cigars: A Culture, picks up where his previous history of the subject covered in his last book left off, looking not simply at how cigars are made or smoked, but at the vast cultural world that has grown around them.
“I think subculture has a propensity to have a negative connotation,” Sigmond says. “When we talk about the cult of the cigar, it’s really the cult of the premium, ultra-premium hand-rolled long-filler cigar.” Cigarettes became a mass product, ‘snuff’ or snorting tobacco became unsavory, but a genuinely premium cigar has historically been defined by craftsmanship, rarity, and ritual.
He describes the making of one as akin to a winemaker producing a single bottle at a time. Each hand-rolled cigar is subtly different, yet the real art lies in maintaining the character of a blend over decades. Sigmond sees only two close comparisons to the cigar and other consumable luxuries: non-vintage Champagne and Cognac, where blending creates a recognizable house identity across generations. “If you lit up a Montecristo cigar from, let’s say, 1965, and then you lit up another one in 2025, it should have a reminiscent blend,” he explains. “It won’t be identical… but it will have a house style.”
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“They’re not a habit; they’re a hobby,” Sigmond defends. And like any serious hobby, it can become an extraordinary rabbit hole. There are lighters and cutters, humidors and cases, vintage boxes and ashtrays; cases made from leather, crocodile, ostrich, and exotic woods; and humidors that can cost thousands – or, at the very top end, seven figures.
Berluti, Gucci, and Hermès have all produced cigar cases, while Asprey and Dunhill have been making cigar accessories for well over a century. Hermès recently re-released its cigar cutter after an absence of around 40 years; vintage Dunhill ‘Aquarium’ lighters, meanwhile, can command between $13,000 and $50,000. “It really goes beyond just the cigars themselves,” Sigmond says. “It goes to [show] the testament of the wide breadth of what premium cigars really are.”
Some of the objects are almost wonderfully ridiculous. Sigmond has encountered miniature guillotines designed to cut a cigar, made in everything from sterling silver to gold, as well as early 20th-century cigar piercers and a porcelain match holder disguised as a cigar. “It’s endless,” he says. “You can buy a humidor in acrylic for [a few dollars], and you can spend not just six, but seven figures on a humidor with a certain degree of ease.”
In his New York home, Sigmond himself keeps around 3,000 cigars, alongside his collection of accessories and cigar-related art. He still has a box belonging to his father, who died almost 20 years ago, containing Dunhill cigars dating from the 1970s. They are still smokeable. He has smoked cigars dating back as far as the 1920s, too.
“The fact of the matter is, it is a heritage product,” he says. “It’s a facet of the good life.” And the good life, in cigar terms, has always been a rather broad concept. Sigmond shows me a framed article from 1827 discussing cigars alongside coffee and tea. The pairing of brandy and cigars, meanwhile, dates back around 300 years. By the Victorian era, the cigar had become a familiar final act to an elaborate meal: cheese, port or brandy, then a smoke.
Photographs of Winston Churchill, JFK, Steve McQueen, Orson Welles, Serge Gainsbourg, Jane Birkin, and James Bond fill the pages of Sigmond’s new book. “Once you open your eyes, the fact is that cigars are literally part of every facet of culture, from fine art to media,” he says, before flicking the page to show even more examples. There is an Andy Warhol portrait of Man Ray smoking a cigar; a Man Ray-designed cigar box; Hitchcock on the cover of French Vogue; and photographs of cigar smokers at everything from the Kentucky Derby to Royal Ascot. Even Chanel’s spring/summer 1996 haute couture show featured models smoking cigars.
That breadth may be the real secret to the cigar’s staying power. It has never depended upon a single generation, celebrity, or fashion. It can be a symbol of old-school masculinity, but Sigmond has also watched the number of female cigar smokers increase markedly, particularly over the past decade. It can be associated with exclusivity, yet he argues that within the luxury world, a premium cigar is actually one of the more accessible indulgences.
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And nowhere is that accumulated history more apparent than London. Sigmond describes the city as one of the world’s great cigar capitals, pointing to the concentration of historic merchants around St James’s and Mayfair: Davidoff, James J Fox, Dunhill, Sautter, and others, each with its own blends, accessories, and traditions. Then there are cigar festivals in the Dominican Republic and Cuba that attract enthusiasts from around the world; people travel specifically to visit famous tobacco plantations and historic factories; hotels maintain private cigar lockers and smoking rooms; and specialist shops have become destinations in their own right.
It’s a surprisingly enduring ecosystem for something that ends up as a pile of ash – but perhaps that is exactly the point. The cigar may be consumed, the object disappears; but the ritual, craftsmanship, collecting, conversation, and associations all remain. As Sigmond puts it, “Cigars, certain cigars, are indeed status symbols,” comparable, in their own way, to a Patek Philippe, Rolex, or Cartier.
After almost two centuries of cigar journalism – the article Sigmond showed me earlier puts the tradition at nearly 200 years – and countless changes in fashion, regulation, and social etiquette, his conclusion is characteristically blunt. “How have they changed in the last 30 years?” he asks. “They have changed dramatically and absolutely categorically not at all.”
Cigars: A Culture by Aaron ‘Sig’ Sigmond is available for preorder here
