If you’re looking for a luxury-mad label-lover, Isla Fisher’s not your girl.

The red-haired Australian actress, clad in a striped sweater and poufy skirt, doesn’t even know who designed her outfit, which she got from her stylist. And she gets annoyed when a gorgeous studded bracelet keeps catching on her black tights, nearly ripping them.

“I’m all right,” she says. “This is a hazardous bracelet. It looks fabulous, but it’s a hazard.”

And unlike your typical calorie-averse fashionista, she eats. At a window table at Fred’s at Barneys, Fisher tears through her lobster salad, buttery bread and tiramisu with the same zest that her Confessions of a Shopaholic character, Rebecca Bloomwood, reserves for spending sprees she can’t afford. In the film, opening Friday and based on Sophie Kinsella’s books, Fisher’s Becky shops till she drops — and ends up $16,000 in debt.

“She’s so different from me. She’s so focused on the outside,” says Fisher, 33. “She just loves clothes and she just loves life, and she wants to make the world more beautiful. How often do you read a comedy script with a woman in the lead, and she’s actually a flawed, deluded character? And I was able to do physical comedy. It was a dream role.”

Still, she found she had a little in common with the misguided Becky, who thinks a green scarf or Pucci boots will change her life. Fisher, always “fairly practical,” has never been in debt and has always lived within her means, even as a broke student in drama school in France. So to research the role, Fisher went to shopaholics-anonymous groups. And in the process, she changed her own behavior.

“Until recently, my closet was overwhelmed. It was an eclectic mess of everything I’d ever owned since I was young. I don’t shop a lot, so I was surprised that I was a hoarder,” she says.

“I was inspired to get rid of everything. Some clothes had meaning. There’d be a cute little top I met my fiancé in, but I’m not going to wear it again. I’ve had a kid since then. It doesn’t fit me. Things had to go.”

So Fisher “put everything in a couple of garbage bags” and gave it to friends.

At home in Los Angeles with her fiancé, Sacha Baron Cohen, and daughter Olive, 1, Fisher keeps her life simple. She’s a minimalist.

“Totally. Furniture. Fashion. Less is more,” she says. “I just don’t have time. The luxuries of grooming, waxing, shaving, clipping, bleaching, blow-drying, exfoliating, moisturizing, cleaning out your closet, shopping — those luxuries are a thing of the past.

“I was never that girl, anyway. I’ll have a manicure very occasionally. My priorities are different. My greatest responsibility is to be a mum.”

An infant a few tables over catches her eye. “Is that a little boy in his highchair? If you saw mine (daughter Olive), you’d die. You’d die. But I don’t actually talk about her publicly,” Fisher says, catching herself. “I don’t talk about her because I want her to have the right to privacy.”

A self-described people-pleaser, Fisher used to be far more open in interviews, but she says she doesn’t discuss her fiancé to keep that part of her life entirely to herself.

“He came to the premiere (in New York) and he’s coming to the U.K. premiere, which is nice — the support,” she says. “It’s a pretty intense experience being the lead of a movie, because I felt so responsible for the tone, and it’s such a beloved character.”

In this crippling economic climate, is it tough promoting a frothy film in which fashion plays a lead role?

“It’s a weird time to be promoting this movie,” says Fisher, who shot the film nearly a year ago. “But I think it’s the perfect time (for it to come out). It is a redemption story. And she does learn a lesson. If I was a parent with a teenager, it’s a good way to educate them.”

Source: USA Today