Why cigarette cases are smoking hot

The year is 1962. We find ourselves in the richly gilded Louis XV-style salons of Les Ambassadeurs Club in Mayfair. A knot of spectators is gathered around a game of baccarat, where a glamorous woman in a red dress is losing to a man in a shawl-collared dinner jacket. He reaches for a gunmetal Dunhill cigarette case. “I admire your courage, Miss er…?” he says. “Trench… Sylvia Trench. I admire your luck, Mr…?” Sean Connery lights his Morland’s cigarette and closes the case with a click. Drawling through the wisping smoke, he replies: “Bond… James Bond.” 

It’s in this scene in Dr No that Bond utters those catechistic words on screen for the first time. It’s also the first time he uses a gadget: a cigarette case.

The popularity of smoking peaked that year. Cases were as ubiquitous as smartphones are today, serving to protect cigarettes, but mostly serving as highly personalised accessories. Some, like the fictional gunmetal case that Fleming described in the Bond novels, were manly and minimalist. Others were exquisite examples of a jeweller’s art. “When you took it out of your pocket, unlike an iPhone, it was a quiet gesture, a quiet communication of your possession of something beautiful,” says London dealer Wartski’s Kieran McCarthy.

Boucheron gold and onyx case, offered at Christie’s in 2024

Paul Emile Brandt silver nickel and enamel box, $7,985, 1stdibs.com

As smoking has declined over the past six decades, cigarette cases have become rarefied collector’s items; relics from an age when smoking was still sophisticated. While simple silver cigarette cases can be found for three-figure sums (Hemswell Antiques is currently selling a geometric silver case by Dunhill for £285) and simple gold ones in the low thousands, exceptional pieces signed by leading makers come with five- and six-figure price tags. 

It is the immense variety of designs that makes cigarette cases so enjoyable to collect today, says Bonhams’ UK co-head of jewellery and Antiques Roadshow expert Kate Flitcroft. “If you’re building a collection, and money is no object, I would personally want to have examples by particular Fabergé workmasters,” she says, citing August Wilhelm Holmström and Feodor Rückert as names to seek out. 

Cigarette cases were as ubiquitous as smartphones are today

Wartski has a particularly splendid Fabergé design for sale at the moment. The case is made in gold and decorated with translucent aubergine and opaque white enamel borders, and features a concealed compartment containing matches to ignite the end of a silken cord. “The owner of the case would light his cigarette with the smouldering end of the tinder, after which the case would be handed on to the next person,” explains McCarthy. Remarkably, the case shows no sign of use; it remains just as it was when it left Fabergé’s St Petersburg premises in the early 20th century. McCarthy identifies it as having been made by Fabergé’s most famous workmaster, Henrik Wigström, who also made “the greatest ever examples of goldsmithing”, Fabergé’s fabled Easter eggs. More than a century after Wigström’s death, his work still commands a premium: Wartski is looking for just under £200,000 for the piece.

Fabergé silver-gilt and pictorial enamel case, sold for £32,000 at Bonhams

Dunhill silver case, £285, hemswell-antiques.com

Art deco pieces offer ornate workmanship at a comparably more reasonable price point. After the first world war, social mores relaxed and fashionable women started to smoke, which provided the great jewellery houses, such as Cartier, Boucheron and Van Cleef & Arpels, with the opportunity to create their own cases. Pieces made with precious stones are particularly desirable. “Collectors love anything with lapis or coral or nephrite, all those typical 1920s art deco materials,” says Christie’s jewellery department specialist Arabella Hiscox. “The colour combinations appeal today as much as they did 100 years ago.” Last summer, Christie’s sold a jade art deco case with a mother-of-pearl panel, carved onyx and rose-cut diamonds by Boucheron for £11,340 over a £3,000 estimate.

There are equally creative pieces from less well-known makers. “Paul Brandt’s cigarette cases scream art deco,” Hiscox says of the Swiss designer known for his geometric, coloured lacquer work in the 1920s to 1950s. “The jewellery he made was very, very typically art deco, but he is not a name that we see as much as the big houses.” Recently, a Brandt cigarette case in enamelled silver nickel with eggshell lacquer sold with Christie’s for $17,640 because the design “was so striking”, she says. 1stDibs currently has a more subtle example made in the same materials for $7,985.

1913 Carl Fabergé gold and diamond case, POA, wartski.com

Boucheron jade, mother-of-pearl and diamond case, sold for £11,340 at Christie’s

Just as Fabergé creations are identified with particular workmasters, the big French houses were famous for their characteristic patterns, such as the Daisy pattern, created by Van Cleef & Arpels in the 1940s. “The whole object is chased and engraved with a yellow-gold floral motif,” says Bonhams’ expert Flitcroft. “Sometimes they’re set with platinum motifs and diamonds. If I were going to add a piece by Van Cleef & Arpels I would want a daisy cigarette case from the 1940s set with diamonds.” (They only occasionally crop up for sale, but Christie’s sold a rare Van Cleef & Arpels daisy-engraved cigarette and make-up case for $23,940 in 2023.)

But for those looking to Bond for inspiration, a humble gunmetal case, like the one that stops a bullet aimed at his heart in the 1957 novel From Russia with Love, will do the job perfectly.