Fun, fizzy dispatches from the city and beyondThe 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.” ?