Fashion Historia

The Burning Man Series: Nevada’s Desert Dress is gaining momentum, and the next article in this series comes to us from Dusty Bacon, who owns and operates DustyCouture.com “Your Burning Man Fashion Blog” where he’s published more than 85 articles on the fashions of Burning Man. He’s been religiously attending the week-long event and designing burner fashions for the last eight years. Both Los Angeles Magazine and LA Weekly have recently interviewed Dusty, and have quoted him in their articles about Burning Man garments.

Today, Dusty shares with us his point of view on Burning Man clothing in comparison with the larger fashion world.

Guest writer, Dusty Bacon (Photo by Anastasia Bobadilla)

A futuristic cave-dweller scantily clad in glowing neon fur emerges from a cloud of dust with her companion, a man dressed in stylish metropolitan clothing that appears to have been patched together from a variety of vintage garments then adorned with Victorian-era filigree designs and offensive slogans. On both their faces are dust masks made from a kimono’s fabric that calls to mind silken visions of the Orient … Though Burning Man is guided by the Ten Principles, the clothing designers of Black Rock City(1), Nevada have become notorious for their lawless and liberated design aesthetic, the results of which, are often profound.

Dusty and Super Burner (Photo by Josh Adler)

Fashion is as alive in Black Rock City as it is in the current fashion meccas of New York, Milan, or Paris, and due to Burning Man being only a week long, the event can even seem like a fashion week in one of these “default world”(2) clothing capitals. To the burner/attendee though, it quickly becomes apparent that fashion serves a different purpose in Black Rock City than it does in the above mentioned places because at Burning Man it’s not runway models in corporate approved lines designed to impress an industry but the citizenry who design and wear their own radically self-expressive works of wearable-art. A number of these “amateur” designed outfits rivaling the level of creativity and artistry present in many of the fashion houses’ lines.

Going hand-in-hand with the tenet of radical self-expression is another of the Ten Principles: Participation aka “No Spectators”. Fashion is something we all have some innate understanding of/experience with so when the line between spectator and participant is removed, suddenly everyone is a designer and fashion becomes the most widespread, accessible, interactive art-form at an event famous for it’s large-scale interactive art.

Photo Collage by Chris Fuqua

It is for this reason that Burning Man has become the world’s largest fashion laboratory in which the limits of what clothing is capable of have been experimented with one week a year for more than two decades. Having experienced this first-hand multiple times, I can say it is a powerful research tool to have instant feedback from hundreds of people on your newest custom creations. And what’s truly amazing is that the feedback tends to be overwhelmingly supportive.

Immersion in an environment where the structures are vastly out of scale, people around you are behaving in radical new ways, and almost none of daily life’s constants are present creates a wide-sweeping, psychedelic effect. With everyones’ awareness poised on the edge of dis-belief, it becomes difficult to keep in mind what the limitations of fashion are. At this moment, when everyone realizes they can express themselves through the readily available art-form of fashion in any way that their imagination allows, under the influence of a radically inspiring and alien environment, fashion truly becomes liberated from the confines of any industry, label, or prejudices it may have once found itself oppressed by.

Synergizing with the expanding possibilities of this new fashion paradigm is the similarly liberated “self” that burner outfits are designed to help express. Some have referred to this transformational coupling as costuming your inner-superhero. I have come to recognize it as fashion’s evolution beyond mere costuming towards a more burnerly purpose: putting the sparks that ignite our humanity on display.

1. The annual, temporary city created by the community of Burning Man participants.

2. The rest of the world that is not the playa during the Burning Man event.

As an aside, those attending the festival this year will want to read, LA Weekly’s article “Burning Man Fashion Survival Guide: Six Styles to Wear Next Week in Black Rock, Nevada” Still haven’t got your fix of burning man fashion? Check out this video which Dusty produced (borderline NSFW)