The children were asleep by ten. After that there was a sewing machine she had won in a competition, a piece of fabric lying around the house, and an hour or so before the night ran out. 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 time left over was the time at the end of the day. She knew she had to sew. She did not yet know how.
The instruction had arrived in a dream. One night she dreamed of her late grandmother, who said a single word: “Sew.” Oksana has never treated dreams as something abstract, and she pays attention to whatever comes to her that way. Today her outfits are ordered 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, the youngest child of the Khunkheev family and a long-awaited daughter after two boys. Her parents kept traditional rituals and spoke Buryat at home, which most families did not do at that time. She says that from childhood she saw everything Buryat around her, and that everything was done as if that were simply the natural way. The family did not wear traditional clothing in daily life, though. Her grandmother had real gutuls, Buryat boots, and that was about all.
There are reasons why a wardrobe empties out over the generations. The Buryats are a Mongolic people whose historical homeland lies around Lake Baikal and in parts of southern Siberia and northern Mongolia. Their culture grew up inside the wider Mongol world: herding, clan-based society, gers, shamanic traditions and, in many communities, Tibetan Buddhism. Russian colonization of this part of Siberia began around the 1620s, when Cossack troops advanced, built forts and imposed tribute. Some communities resisted or fled south into Mongolia, but Russian authority was established by the early 18th century. Under the empire, and especially under the Soviet Union, integration went deeper: collectivization, the repression of Buddhist institutions and of the Buryat elite, and Russification. In 1958 Soviet authorities removed the word “Mongol” from the name of the republic. By 1938 every working Buryat datsan, or Buddhist monastery, had been closed, and much religious art and many manuscripts were taken away or destroyed. Lamas were arrested, exiled or executed, and the Great Purge hit Buryat teachers, writers, officials and clergy hard. In September 1937 the Buryat-Mongol republic was divided, and three districts were transferred to Irkutsk Oblast, later forming the Ust-Orda autonomous district.
That is the district where Oksana grew up, playing with dolls, inventing patterns and sewing clothes for them, and watching the Mexican telenovela Simplemente Maria, in which a girl from a remote rural province arrives in the capital and becomes a designer. Little Oksana from Ust-Ordynsky wanted exactly that. Her teenage years, however, went badly. In eighth grade she moved to a new school and became an outcast at once. She was used to brothers who protected her and a father who called her his “beauty”, but at the new school classmates mocked her full lips, turned her surname into insults and kicked her bag of textbooks down the corridors. She learned to shut herself off. Even now, any conflict sets off what she calls a delayed-reaction syndrome: the hurt does not arrive at the moment it happens but hours or days later, and it is very hard to deal with. Because she wanted to understand why people behave like that, she took a university degree in psychology.
The turning point came by chance. In 2008 she took a job at the Center for the Preservation and Development of the Buryat Ethnic Group, which that year was organizing the Altargana festival in Irkutsk. The festival began in Mongolia in 1994 and has since become international, drawing participants from Inner Mongolia to France. Oksana was astonished by its scale and by what she saw there. “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 has small leaves and modest golden-yellow flowers and looks humble, but whose root system is extraordinarily well developed. She thought a great deal about her own roots and understood what she wanted to make. She was still a long way from being able to make it.
Her first costumes were for relatives, because she wanted her children, her nieces and her nephews to wear national clothing and take an interest in their culture. They came out beautiful and also impossible to wear: made strictly according to tradition, they had nowhere to go. She wanted to be seen too, so she entered fashion shows, and at one of them a journalist came over and asked for an interview, exactly as in the telenovela. The runway, the lights and the professional models were her childhood dream itself, but over time she has come to think that what she really wants is for people to wear her clothes. In 2023 she was named best designer in the Ust-Orda Buryat district.
For her, a Buryat costume is not a museum exhibit. The work begins with the person: she first tries to work out what shapes and silhouettes a client likes in ordinary clothes, and only then translates those preferences into the language of Buryat costume. The whole family is now involved. Her husband organizes; her mother helps at shows, irons garments and finishes urgent sewing; her father makes special knives and drives everyone where they need to go; her mother-in-law and sister-in-law help as well. The workshop’s own listing, under an Irkutsk phone number, offers national costumes, modern stylized outfits, headwear, shamanic objects such as bowls and small bells, ethnic jewellery, Buryat dolls, and the sashes, pipes and pouches used at weddings.
There is a wider market for such work now. Designers from Russia’s many nationalities have attracted attention with ethnic clothing, among them Ulzyma Vantazova in the Republic of Buryatia, who makes caftans from felted sheep wool, the traditional fabric of nomads, and decorates them with Buddhist ornaments. The language is in a weaker state than the clothing. In the 2002 Russian census, 353,113 people out of an ethnic population of 445,175 said they spoke Buryat.
And there is the present. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Buryatia has reportedly had unusually high numbers of military casualties and mobilization. The independent outlet Ludi Baikala counted 9,200 people from Buryatia and the Irkutsk region killed between 2022 and 2026.
Oksana laughs when she admits that she sometimes wants to go back to calm, stable office work. Then someone comes up to her and asks how they can get a costume like hers. “It’s as though someone won’t let me go and keeps saying, ‘Sew.’”