The children fell asleep at 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, sales work mostly, and the only time left over was the time at the end of the day. She knew that she had to sew. She did not yet know how.
The instruction had arrived the way instructions sometimes do. One night she dreamed of her late grandmother, who said a single word: “Sew.” Oksana has never treated dreams as abstractions; 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 was not what most families did at the time. She says that from childhood she saw everything Buryat around her, and that everything was done as though that was simply the natural way things should be. The family did not, however, wear traditional clothing in daily life. Her grandmother had real gutuls, Buryat boots, and that was about the extent of it.
There are reasons a wardrobe empties out over generations. The Buryats are a Mongolic people whose historical homeland is centred on the Lake Baikal region and areas of southern Siberia and northern Mongolia, and whose culture developed inside the wider Mongol world: mobile and semi-mobile pastoralism, clan-based social organisation, gers, shamanic traditions and, in many communities, Tibetan Buddhism. Russian colonization of these parts of Siberia began around the 1620s with the military advance of the Cossacks. Forts were built, tribute was imposed, and the political ties that had connected Buryat communities to Mongol rulers were displaced. Communities resisted, attacked Russian positions, or fled south into Mongolia before Russian authority was established through the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Under the empire and especially the Soviet Union, integration deepened: land and economic redistribution, collectivization, the repression of Buddhist institutions and Buryat elites, and cultural Russification. In 1958 Soviet authorities removed the word “Mongol” from the republic’s name. By 1938 every functioning Buryat datsan had been closed and much of the religious art, manuscripts and material culture confiscated or destroyed; lamas were disenfranchised, arrested, exiled or executed, and the Great Purge fell hard on Buryat teachers, writers, officials and clergy. In September 1937 the Buryat-Mongol republic was divided, with the Alar, Bokhan and Ekhirid-Bulagad districts 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, 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 went badly. In eighth grade she transferred 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”; 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 land at the moment it happens but hours or days later, and is very hard to process. Wanting to understand why people behave that way, she took a university degree in psychology. Ethnic stereotypes in Russia remain understudied; one survey of 1,115 respondents produced a map of the sixty most numerous domestic ethnic groups, finding that perceived status predicted judgments of competence, and competition predicted a lack of warmth.
The turn 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 grown international, drawing participants from Inner Mongolia to France. Oksana was astonished by the scale of it and by what she saw. “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 takes its name from the altargana plant, which has small leaves and modest golden-yellow flowers and looks humble, but whose root system is extraordinarily 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 and loved ones, because she wanted her children, her nieces and nephews to wear national clothing and take an interest in their culture. They came out beautiful and also unwearable: made strictly according to the canon, 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 the way it had happened in the telenovela. The runway, the lights and the professional models were the childhood dream itself, but over time she has come to think that what she actually 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 in it. Her husband organizes; her mother helps at shows, irons garments, 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, runs to national costumes, contemporary stylized outfits, headwear, shamanic objects such as bowls and small bells, ethnic jewellery, Buryat dolls, and the sashes, pipes and pouches used at weddings, with Dmitry Alkhunsaev named as the consultant on shamanic items.
There is a wider market for this now. Designers from Russia’s many nationalities have drawn attention with ethnic work, among them Ulzyma Vantazova in the Republic of Buryatia, who makes caftans from felted sheep wool, the nomads’ traditional fabric, and decorates them with Buddhist ornaments. The language, meanwhile, is thinner than the clothing. In the 2002 Russian census, 353,113 people out of an ethnic population of 445,175 reported speaking Buryat. UNESCO’s 2010 atlas of endangered languages described Buryat varieties as endangered to differing degrees rather than giving them a single status. An ethnography of news media in the Buryat territories found that as language shift progressed, Buryat-language media took on an increasingly symbolic rather than informational role, with content growing more culturally circumscribed.
And there is the present. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Buryatia has reportedly seen disproportionately high 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.’”