Here at Cheap JAP, we do our best to shop with respect to Karma. For our purposes here, Karma means the odds of us finding fab stuff on the cheap increase in direct proportion to the frequency with which we do the right thing (i.e. allying ourselves with each other in lieu of allying ourselves with trends, money-hemorrhaging, criticism and all the other icky stuff encouraged by our Conde Nasty subscriptions).

If you sow goodness, you will reap goodness; if you sow evil, you will reap evil, say the Vedas. Fashion’s been breaking the law of moral causation since its inception, what with its capitalizing on our insecurities to con us into buying shit we don’t need and all. The fact that making women feel bad about themselves continually nets the Industry a collective chunk o’ change seemingly denotes Fashion as exempt from Karmic payback: Sow evil and you’ll thrive, as long as you’re in vogue. Alas, you can only fuck with the balance of the universe for so long before the universe responds by delivering the perfect antidote to your venomous actions.

By unloading on us its effed up expectations, Fashion ensures that when we look in the mirror, we don’t like what we see. We’re never quite as beautiful or as thin or as youthful or as chic as we think we should be – as Fashion tells us we CAN be. So we go out and buy what it recommends, encouraged at the prospect of feeling a little better about ourselves the next time we look in the mirror. And it doesn’t fucking work. New material crap is a Band-Aid for self-esteem, not a means of achieving it. None of us will EVER be beautiful enough or thin enough or young enough or chic enough to fulfill the glossies’ sartorial ideal. Why? Because the moment we are is the moment we stop giving a shit about what they say.

Fashion’s obsessed with the image aspired to, not to the one that’s actually there. If the Industry saw itself clearly, the curtain would fall and expose the ridiculousness inherent in its notion of itself and the unreality inherent in its idea of how we should look.

That Fashion’s Karmic payback comes in the form of a mirror, then, is more than fitting. Want to know what Fashion REALLY looks like? Meet Bruno, and not just ’cause he’s, like, soooo hot right now.

This overtanned, label-saturated, self-obsessed, syllabant S-swinging fashion journalist is much, much more than another of Sascha Baron Cohen’s hilarious aliases. Bruno’s a living, breathing concentration of Fashion’s utter absurdity, one that makes mockery of the Industry simply by reflecting it back on itself.

We’re all obvs going to see the film and laugh our un-toned asses off. But I think (I hope) we’ll get something more than a chuckle out of Bruno’s antics too.

I hope we’ll take advice from the likes of Karl Lagerfeld (one of Bruno’s most prominent inspirations, obvs) with a grain of salt as massive as he used to be. (Karl, dahlingk, it’s easy to claim that losing weight is as simple as buying smaller sizes and eating less food after GASTRIC BYPASS SURGERY, you hypocritical little shit. Let’s see if you can still say no to those pastries once your stomach inevitably starts to stretch. Perhaps you and your fingerless leather gloves should have taken a grammar course and swallowed a large, low-cal dose of common sense before dispensing sartorial advice to American women in broken English. Just a suggestion).

I hope we’ll stop seeing only what Fashion wants us to see when we look in the mirror; I hope we’ll remember that the sartorial ideal comes in the form of an overtanned, blond-streaked, velcro-jumpsuit clad, uber-flamboyant man.

And I hope we’ll realize that Karma doesn’t give a shit about what’s on the outside – that whether or not ours is good or bad has little to do with how we look in the mirror, and everything to do with how we act away from it.

Kumbaya beotches. Kumbaya.