A woman looks in the mirror in Haight Street’s Kimono Dave, trying on one of the Burning Man designer’s long, fuzzy coats. Dave Carr silently approaches from the other side of the store and, without saying a word, plucks a beret off a rack on the wall to place on her head. 

She blinks, pauses, then suggests a different color. Carr swaps out the beret for a purple one, and adjusts it on her head with a small stylistic flourish. 

“That’s just one way,” he says. “Berets are very versatile.”

Like all things fashion, the versatility of a beret is debatable, but the style of almost everything sold at Kimono Dave — the moniker of both the store and its owner — is entwined with the anything-goes aesthetics of Burning Man. Operating on Haight Street between Belvedere and Cole, the shop shares a bustling stretch of street with a handful of expensive vintage stores and many, many tourists. 

As his name suggests, Dave deals in kimono-style blazers (hovering in the $300 range), jackets (priced $280 to $1,025, excluding shrugs), and more affordable rave-style sunglasses, fuzzy bucket hats and berets of all colors.

His designs marry leisure with maximalism. There are knee-length, reversible faux-fur coats, fuzzy rainbow numbers and drapey, floral print kimonos. It’s over the top without a hint of kitsch. You could call it festival chic, or, to put a finer point on it, Burning Man chic. 

Dave, who’s embarking on his 13th Burn this year, is something of a minor celebrity at the desert gathering. He’s been Kimono Dave for a few years, and each year, more strangers recognize him. It’s bound to happen when “you’re a f—king caricature,” he admits. (The Kimono Dave logo is a cartoon drawing of Dave holding a beer.) 

The reputation has led Burners from as far away as Israel and Australia to make the trip to his store in San Francisco, and he notices more of his pieces on the playa each summer. Looking for his clothes, he said, is “the coolest game of Where’s Waldo that anybody’s ever played.” He’s even heard through the grapevine that someone gifted one of his kimonos to Elon Musk during a “very private wedding” at Burning Man, but like many rumors birthed at the event, it’s hard to separate truth from myth. 

Before he even touched a sewing machine, Dave was a “corporate sales guy” in New York. His fashion sense at the time, by his own admission, was “borderline terrible.” He wore a suit and tie to work every day.

In his first step toward independence from corporate life, he quit his job to open a recruiting firm. Around that time, he decided to learn to sew and bought a sewing machine off of Amazon. The day it arrived, he looked up how to sew a kimono, and six hours later, he had his first piece. He wore it to the Envision festival in Costa Rica, which markets itself as a “utopian jungle experience.” 

“People were asking me every five minutes, where did I get that?” Dave said. He left with a list of 10 potential customers, and Kimono Dave was born.

While still operating his recruiting firm, he began sewing for hours every day. On weekend nights, Dave appeared at Brooklyn parties with a rack of hand-sewn clothes. Two years ago, he quit his day job to turn Kimono Dave into a full-time venture and relocated to San Francisco to set up shop on Haight Street. He hired a professional seamstress and he hardly ever sews now, except for designing and prototyping.

Even after a tough year for businesses — “This year is significantly slower,” he admits — Dave’s business steadily grows. He recently worked with manufacturers in China to custom design his own faux fur, in a process he describes as “prohibitively expensive.” A second location in New York or LA is in the works, and after Burning Man, he plans to begin work on a streetwear line, along with everyday items like sweatpants, T-shirts and hoodies. 

Dave reassures me that no matter how the brand grows, the clothes will still be “on the edge of what some people would wear.”

When I asked Dave for his thoughts on his position as a white man selling kimonos, a traditional Japanese garment, he made a well-trodden appeal to cultural appreciation, as opposed to appropriation. Some Japanese designers have told him that they appreciate his work, he said, and others have even asked to collaborate. He’s been pressed on the issue before, but “if you’re an artist, you’re going to get criticism at some point, no matter what,” he said.

When I met Dave, I had a hard time imagining him wearing a suit and working in corporate sales. His work uniform today is a fedora, sheer scarf and thick glasses. This is Kimono Dave, not Dave Carr. But it all clicked when I saw him on the floor of the store.

When I heard he was a great salesman, I had a mental image of a used car dealer. But Dave’s approach is gentle, never pushy. 

After greeting a customer, he steps back and lets them browse. This is important. Dave waits to make his move until a customer stands in front of the mirror. More like a Venus flytrap than a shark.

Watching Dave style customers reminds me of a shopping montage from a movie. He holds up a fuzzy pink jacket, then a reversible faux-fur number. I watched one first-time Burner cycle through six or seven coats. 

Dave takes a feathered bucket hat and puts it on a man’s head. “It’s fully reversible,” he says. He hands another customer a vest. “It’s blacklight reactive,” he explains.

Today is a revolving door day, Dave tells me, which means tons of customers but few actual buyers. Even so, he’s not discouraged. In the weeks leading up to Burning Man, he typically sells a few coats every day. And besides, the real sales come from festivals. At the right event, Dave can make as much in one weekend of a festival as two months at the store. 

There’s only one event that’s off-limits. 

In line with the Burning Man principle of decommodification, Dave stresses that he “would never even consider” selling anything at Burning Man. But he acknowledges that “leading up to the event, there’s all kinds of people that want to have things that really express themselves.” That includes pop-up sales in Nevada, just a few days before that decommodification principle kicks in.

Kimono Dave is someone who has turned the Burn into a yearlong activity.

The store is a tiny slice of the Burn — like the ever-burning flame lit at the Olympics. (In fact, the brand was originally called “Burn Eternal.”) DJs sometimes come into the shop to perch on the balcony to perform live for customers, but I visited on a milder day, with Dave playing a tropical house playlist while a muted video of a playa DJ set screened on a TV.

The scene made me wonder: What happens when Kimono Dave becomes your identity and your brand? While Dave insists his designs are not expressly for Burning Man, he admits that the event gives him most of his business and inspiration. In order for Dave Carr to become Kimono Dave full-time, did Kimono Dave have to consume Dave Carr? In order to express his true self year-round, did he have to twist it into a commodity? What happens when Burning Man becomes a yearlong job?

Things came to a head after Dave posted a picture of himself and his girlfriend on the playa, wearing coats he designed, on his Instagram account. In the lengthy caption, he mostly discussed the 2022 Burn, although near the end he touched on his clothing line. Later, a Reddit post featuring a screenshot of Dave’s message gained a small amount of traction. “Commodification of BM — Kimono Dave — isn’t this not allowed?” 

A few commenters agreed that he was using imagery of the playa to advertise his brand. Dave then deleted the post, and reuploaded it later with a clarification: “My intention was to talk about something I’ve been thinking about for awhile which is how to integrate your festival wardrobe into your daily life, something that has changed my life forever.”

The controversy sparked a small debate within Burning Man circles but didn’t go much further. It did raise some thorny questions though. For somebody like Dave, whose brand is intertwined with his identity, is this a personal statement or marketing? Are the two separable? I can’t help but wonder if this is Dave’s devil’s bargain: make Burning Man your life at the risk of never truly Burning again.

But if there’s one thing I took away from talking to Dave, it’s that he loves Burning Man. By his estimation, he’s taken 100 people to their first Burns. He describes the festival as “the most inspirational thing” in his life.

“It’s a profound sense and feeling of freedom that is basically impossible to find anywhere else,” Dave said. “Because you just have zero responsibilities while you’re out there.” 

“You should, anyways,” he quickly added.