Fashion

The fashion industry is designed to make you feel ugly. Top designers put beautiful clothes on beautiful people, make them scowl at the camera and take a picture of them to make you think that in order for your normal looking self to get that pretty, you'll need those sweet pair of jeans or slightly distressed t-shirt too. By nature, the fashion industry is designed to alienate the normal people, and subsequently attempt to make them want to be part of this odd little world where everyone is better looking than Barbie or Ken. It's elitist and a realm that is fenced off from the homely.

Sascha Baron Cohen does an excellent job bringing this sense of superiority and alienation to light in his Fashion segment. Whether it's through getting a fashion designer to admit that she thinks that people who live in trailer parks are "rubbish" or having some goofy dude say that fashion is what "keeps us alive", viewers can't believe that successful people could ever be that irrational and borderline crazy. The worst is when he gets a small dude with a faux-hawk to admit that Osama bin Laden is really cool and fashionable. It's a terrible scene, and makes you wonder how a potentially normal person could ever get so snooty and ignorant.

The thing is though, like we talked about in class, none of these people would ever say what they do say if it wasn't in the presence of an odd Austrian homosexual encouraging them to do so. At times it seems as if Bruno is putting words in their mouths, but the thing is, they make no effort to stop it or act as if what he's saying is off kilter. In fact, they seem to whole heartedly agree except for Michael of Michael and Huschi, who I'm pretty sure was wearing a Burger King cap.

Baron Cohen has a way of either getting people to let their guards down or to offend them to no end, and through both, he manages to flesh out the intolerance hidden in all of his targets.

I attached a link below of a guy who wrote about his experience on the Ali G. show from a magazine I worked for over the summer. He was the virgin in Ali's Sex segment, and it's interesting to hear what he has to say as a guy on the receiving end of the prank.

http://www.relevantmagazine.com/pc_article.php?id=951