The children fell asleep at ten o’clock. After that there was a sewing machine she had won in a competition, a piece of fabric lying around the house, and about an hour before the night ended. Oksana Alkhunsaeva had come back from her second maternity leave to jobs that had nothing to do with sewing, mostly sales work, and the only free time she had was at the end of the day. She knew that she had to sew. She did not yet know how.
The instruction had come in a dream. One night she saw her late grandmother, who said one word: “Sew.” Oksana always pays attention to what comes to her in dreams. Today people order her outfits from all over Russia, from Moscow and St. Petersburg to Yakutsk and Kamchatka.
She was born in 1984 in Ust-Ordynsky, a settlement of about 15,000 people in the Irkutsk region. She was the youngest child in the family and the long-awaited daughter after two sons. Her parents kept traditional rituals and spoke Buryat at home, which most families did not do at that time. But the family did not wear traditional clothes in daily life. Her grandmother had real gutuls, which are Buryat boots, and that was all.
There are reasons why traditional clothes disappeared over the generations. The Buryats are a Mongolic people who live around Lake Baikal, in southern Siberia and in northern Mongolia. Russian colonization of this part of Siberia began around the 1620s, when Cossack soldiers moved in, built forts and demanded tribute. Later, under the Soviet Union, Buryat culture and religion were pushed back, and in 1958 the Soviet authorities removed the word “Mongol” from the name of the republic.
As a child in Ust-Ordynsky, Oksana made clothes for her dolls and watched the Mexican telenovela Simplemente Maria, in which a girl from a far-away village comes to the capital and becomes a designer. Oksana wanted exactly that life. Her teenage years, however, were hard. In eighth grade she moved to a new school, where classmates laughed at her lips, made insults out of her surname and kicked her bag of books along the corridor. She learned to close herself off. Because she wanted to understand why people behave like that, she studied psychology at university.
The change came by chance. In 2008 she took a job at a centre for Buryat culture, which that year was organizing the Altargana festival in Irkutsk. The festival started in Mongolia in 1994 and now brings people from many countries. “Before that, I had barely seen our national clothing. But at the festival, all the richness of Buryat traditions was there at once. I watched and admired it,” she recalls. The festival is named after the altargana plant, which looks humble, with small leaves and yellow flowers, but has very deep roots. She thought about her own roots and understood what she wanted to make.
Her first costumes were for relatives, because she wanted her children, her nieces and her nephews to wear national clothes. They were beautiful, but nobody could wear them in ordinary life. She also entered fashion shows, and at one of them a journalist asked her for an interview, exactly as in the telenovela. In 2023 she was named best designer in the Ust-Orda Buryat district.
For Oksana, a Buryat costume is not a museum object. She starts with the person, asking what shapes the client likes in ordinary clothes, and then puts those ideas into the language of Buryat costume. The whole family works with her: her husband organizes, her mother irons and finishes urgent sewing at shows, and her father makes special knives and drives everyone.
Life around her is not calm. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Buryatia has reportedly lost very many soldiers. The independent outlet Ludi Baikala counted 9,200 people from Buryatia and the Irkutsk region killed between 2022 and 2026.
Oksana laughs when she says that she sometimes wants to go back to quiet office work. Then someone comes up to her and asks how to get a costume like hers. “It’s as though someone won’t let me go and keeps saying, ‘Sew.’”