Upon meeting briefly at the COP26 conference last year, British Foreign Secretary and Tory leadership candidate Liz Truss allegedly asked the First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon about how to score an interview with Vogue magazine.

The Scottish first minister, speaking at an Edinburgh event on Wednesday, brought up the instance when she met the Conservative leadership in Glasgow last year just shortly after the magazine interview came out. 

“I remember it quite well actually,” Sturgeon told the audience. “I had just done, and this is going to sound really up myself but I don’t mean to … I’d just been interviewed by Vogue, as you do … that was the main thing she wanted to talk to me about, she wanted to know how she could get into Vogue.

“I said to her, they came and asked me.”

Sturgeon was responding to Truss' remark on the Scottish minister at a Conservative leadership hustings event, where Truss called her an "attention seeker" and that “the best thing to do with Nicola Sturgeon is to ignore her”.

Truss, who ruled out a second independence referendum that would make Scotland an independent sovereign nation, told the audience: “She’s an attention seeker, that’s what she is. What we need to do is show the people of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales what we’re delivering for them and making sure that all of our government policies apply right across the United Kingdom.”

In June, Sturgeon announced that the Scottish parliament would publish an independence referendum bill, with a vote on secession scheduled for October 19, 2023.

Sturgeon described Truss' face as "looked a little bit as if she'd swallowed a wasp" when the minister told the British foreign secretary that she had appeared in Vogue twice - the first time in 2015, and the second in 2021. 

“I remember it because there we were at the world’s biggest climate change conference in Glasgow, world leaders about to arrive. That was the main topic of conversation she was interested in pursuing. And once we’d exhausted that it kind of dried up.”

“I’m sure we’ll have many more conversations about many more substantive things,” she added. “I’m sure she’ll be in Vogue before too long.”

Vogue: fashion bible, political propaganda?

The West's obsession with PR and building reputation is not new - Vogue seems to be the latest springboard for garnering popularity among the masses. It is no wonder that Truss set the climate crisis aside with the Scottish first minister as she eyes the next bid to become prime minister. 

Most recently and very controversially, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy and his wife, Olena, posed for a Vogue photoshoot while their country is at war. Many were asking how, for a president who posed for the bulletproof vest at the beginning of the war, could the head of state make time for lights, camera and action? 

The images featuring the #Ukrainian President and the First Lady went viral on social media as users mocked and criticized #Zelensky for his decision to pose for a vanity magazine while his country is ravaged by war.#Ukraine #Russia pic.twitter.com/IeHrKTxj6B

— Al Mayadeen English (@MayadeenEnglish) July 29, 2022

Such a PR stunt comes amid thousands of casualties from both sides of the war, as Olena used her appearance in the magazine to plead for more weapons from the West to Ukraine. What would Truss be demanding other than British popularity and preferability?