Jason Alper: Dressing Bruno, Borat, & More

Sasha Baron Cohen's various fictional onscreen incarnations would be nothing without their outlandish wardrobes. Borat's banana hammock and Bruno's more recent otherworldly red carpet ensembles, for instance, are nothing short of genius. Relatively unknown, however, is the man behind the sartorial madness: Jason Alper. A classically trained costume designer, Alper began working in theatrical costuming 20 years ago. Eight years later he met Cohen in a mutual friend's London apartment, and ever since, Alper has been the actor's go-to stylist.

Vena Cava’s Lisa Mayock recently interviewed the designer. The Q&A between Mayock and Alper is brief but reveals quite a bit about his relationship with Cohen: “We come up with the characters together—he comes up with certain elements—the way the character acts and talks, and I come up with the costumes and the visual element.” According to Alper, Ali G’s look is modeled after a DJ called Armin Van Buren. As for Bruno, the hair was all Zac Efron (the final incarnation of a character whose coif evolved from “crimped blonde hair and a tiny mustache” and then “a faux-hawk"). But after three films in a row, Alper isn’t especially anxious to launch into the next project: “I think it’s time and we all need a little bit of time away from each other. I wouldn’t be surprised if we did more together in the future, but at the moment everyone is doing their own thing.”