Where to Get Fire Outfits for Burning Man
That vague daydream you have about going to Burning Man someday—the one where you emerge from the radical-honesty workshop wearing nothing but patchouli oil and then proceed to writhe ecstatically on the desert floor until dawn—may need a little fine-tuning. After all, winds on the Black Rock Desert’s playa, or prehistoric lake bed, can reach up to seventy-five miles an hour and are loaded with enough alkali particles to burn the skin, and temperatures can range from a hundred and ten to forty. So you’re really going to expose your bare ass to some kind of thermally fluctuating, crust-forming Shake ’n Bake situation? Dude.
Nancy Marcus and her colleagues have you covered. Since 2013, Marcus has organized pop-up bazaars at which she and other designers sell clothes that they’ve designed or curated expressly “for the Burn.” Now in its fortieth year, Burning Man—which has attracted such unlikely pilgrims as Mark Zuckerberg, Paris Hilton, and Grover Norquist—was described by one longtime Burner as “a shantytown-trailer-park tailgate party.” But this summer’s Burner bazaar, held in SoHo, felt more like Mad Max, the Department Store. Nestled into a space the size of an airport Cinnabon, Marcus and thirteen other designers manned racks of clothes heavy on iridescence, leather, Day-Glo, and fake fur; the over-all vibe was, as one shopper put it, “very non-essential worker.” Marcus, in a lizardy, hand-painted skirt and bib, said that durability was an important aspect of designing for the Burn: “We build a city and we take it down, and we leave no trace. You can’t have sequins falling off your outfit.” She held up a pair of low-slung gold lamé pants to an older male customer, who enthused about the “dropped crotch.” Marcus encourages clients to buy clothes outside their comfort zone and to practice wearing them at home. Some purchase fourteen different outfits, one for each day and night of the festival.
One of Burning Man’s ten governing principles is radical self-expression, and the clothes complied. “It has a built-in assassin mask,” a designer named Ali Sardar said, of a mouth-level band of fabric emanating from the collar of a calf-length gray coat recycled from a vintage curtain ($750). Sardar was wearing a topee, sunglasses, and a leopard-print shirt unbuttoned to the navel: the playah on the playa. Jessica Ding, another designer, shyly said, of her leather holsters, “I have a high-femme warrior-queen aesthetic.”
Fun, fizzy dispatches from the city and beyond
The Russian American designer Lunara Love, a Burning Man veteran, was mellower. (“I used to go like religion, like a church you can’t stop,” she said. “Then I came to my senses.”) She was selling swaths of wrinkled gauzy muslin and cotton fabric in neutral colors ($200-$300), just the thing to wear when cupping a stranger’s face in your hands and announcing, “I forgive you.” Love emphasized that a week of partying and art viewing on the playa can breed ferocity. “One time, I jumped ten feet down from an art car in platform shoes because I thought I was a cat,” she said. “Burning Man: safety third.”
A petite vender named Audra Rodriguez was selling tiny leather pouches—“for your herbs and powders and pills,” she explained. After Eva Bogdanova showed a preppy customer one of her minimalist “Adam” belts—essentially, a golf-ball-size metal ring attached to a narrow belt—the customer remarked that he had once been invited to a workshop called “The Nuance of the Pelvic Bowl.” She stared at him as if receiving instructions from outer space.
The designers were mostly united in their distaste for what are known on the playa as Sparkle Ponies. As Burning Man’s website describes them, “Often fashionably attired, they may have packed too many costumes and not enough radical self-reliance.” Love castigated “influencer girls who think they are queens and need to be served.” Marcus cautioned against “wedges that are too high” and “headpieces that are moving around and falling off the head.”
There was less consensus about the dust kicked up from the playa, which can be dense enough to cause whiteouts. “Embrace the dust,” Sam Lopez, a Peruvian designer, said, adding that the detritus left in the Sparkle Ponies’ wake—MOOP, or “matter out of place”—inspires his designs: “I think about my pieces not MOOPing out on bumpy bike rides.” A tall vender in leopard-print slacks wasn’t worried about what the desert might do to her full-length faux-fur coats. “When you’re done with the coat, you can just get rid of it,” she said. “Maybe at the airport.” ♦