When the US arrived on the world’s political stage in 1918, Europe stared with eyes wide open: freshly arrived in France to find their husbands, American women proudly showed the old, astounded continent that cigarettes were no longer the privilege of men, and that the difference between smoking room and boudoir had been erased…

Negligently to place those long ivory and mother-of-pearl cigarette-holders to their lips and swathing their femininity in a typically masculine veil, became the height of Parisian elegance.