Emma Cowing: Wark should work at dressing for success

Perhaps that is why it comes as something of a shock to learn that Wark, whisper it, wears vintage. By which she really means, stage whisper it, second hand. Of course, being Wark, it’s not just any old second hand.

While she was a student, Wark reveals in a recent interview with the Radio Times, she used to go rummaging around jumble sales in Edinburgh’s Morningside, often coming out with “a cashmere cardigan or two”. Try doing that at a jumble sale in Glasgow’s Possilpark. You’d be more likely to emerge with a neon pink Kappa tracksuit and a summons.

She also reveals that on one edition of Newsnight, she wore a dress altered from a skirt by her mother, and has “always worn vintage”.

I do find it impressive that we have such a slew of glamorous words these days to describe clothes that other people have worn, all of which are designed to mask the essential mundanity of the clothing item. It’s marketing, really. “Vintage” and “recycled” sound so much more appealing than “stuck down the back of a complete stranger’s wardrobe for the last ten years and smelling faintly of wet dog”.

I may be in a minority here, but second hand – sorry, vintage – has never really done it for me. You need a good eye, for starters (I have a friend who can dive into the smallest of charity shops in the bleakest of small Scottish towns and still emerge with something that looks like it was designed by Karl Lagerfeld – I usually leave with a dog-eared Robert Ludlum and a rounded sense of disappointment), and I could never get rid of the wet dog smell. Call me old fashioned, but I like my clothes unworn.

But Kirsty’s wardrobe secrets don’t end there. Her favourite cardigans, she reveals, come from H&M and cost £9.99, while she seems to spend hours scouring websites for designer bargains, and once purchased an orange and turquoise Oscar de la Renta dress that had been reduced on what is described, slightly sinisterly, as “a German website”.

What impresses me most about this admittedly thrifty approach to clothes shopping is where she finds the time. Wark, I have been given to understand, commutes up and down to London by sleeper from her Glasgow home. As well as Newsnight and Newsnight Review she has a number of side projects, a production company, as well as a family. When, I wonder, is she finding the time to log on to these German websites, trawl faithfully through the no doubt endless images of cut-price designer duds, before settling on the, er, orange and turquoise one?

But there is, I fear, an ever-so-slightly larger issue here, which is that if Wark really is our head girl – and she has done nothing in her career of late to dispel the notion – then shouldn’t she occasionally dress like one?

Oh, I know it’s easy to criticise, but if I was earning her rumoured £500,000 a year salary then you wouldn’t catch me rooting around jumble sales for cashmere cardis or buying cheap ones from a Swedish high street store, I’d be snapping them up from fabulous Scottish cashmere producers like Brora and Johnstons of Elgin.

And if I was on telly several times a week I’d like to think I’d at least occasionally make a point of wearing clothes by emerging young Scottish designers such as Holly Fulton and Jonathan Saunders, championing their work and giving a much-needed boost for a section of Scottish industry that sometimes struggles to receive recognition on a national scale. And if I were asked about my clothing habits in the Radio Times? Well, I don’t think I’d be showing off about paying less than a tenner for a top.

It’s all very well to give the impression of being thrifty in these recession-led times, but sometimes, those of us who don’t earn the huge salaries, and pay attention to the wardrobes of those who do, want to see a bit of glamour. Even in a head girl.