On a lovely day late last April, I sat down for lunch with one of the Greater Erdenet Area Soumers – a Peace Corps Volunteer who lived in a soum a few hours’ drive of Erdenet. The weather had been unseasonably hot this month, with temperatures reaching the 80s (high 20s, for you non-Americans), and since the fur-lined boots she’d worn for the past six months had suddenly become unbearable, she’d come into town to peruse our зах – zakh, or market.
“I found these flats for eight thousand tugs!” she said excitedly, pulling them out of her bag to show me. “They’re a little Mongol-Fabulous, but for that price, they’ll do.” (8,000 MNT, at that time, was worth about 6 USD.)
They were, indeed, Mongol-Fabulous: black and shiny, with bows on the toes and an obnoxiously large rhinestone design on the heels. Neither she nor I would ever have dreamed of purchasing them in America, much less wearing them to work. But here they would blend in nicely.
Mongolian fashion sense, to the American eye, is… a little out there. I don’t like my clothing to sparkle at all, but even if I liked the look in moderation, I’d still find the Mongolian passion for all things bedazzled a little overwhelming. Shirts, shoes, dresses, jeans, hair clips, sunglasses – if it can hold rhinestones, it will usually be covered in them.
Even the wallpaper in your average Mongolian home glitters. It is also likely patterned with enormous flowers, as in the examples below.
Mongolians like prints on their clothes, too. Specifically leopard print. In my fifteen months in the country, the only leopard-printed piece of clothing was the scarf I used as a tail for my Halloween costume, but a number of the female Peace Corps Volunteers adopted the leopard-print leggings trend so popular among the locals.
Speaking of leggings: do they spark debate in other countries, or is that specific to the American twenty-something demographic? Among college-age American girls, there’s a pronounced split between those who do and do not consider leggings to be pants. Personally, I treat them as I would tights: leg coverings that provide decent covering when paired a long shirt or short dress but are, on their own, insufficient. Most of the girls at my alma mater, where North Face jacket + black leggings + Ugg boots was practically a uniform, disagreed.
So, for that matter, do Mongolians. Most of them dress up for work but dress down as soon as they get home, and this often means swapping a dress or nice pair of slacks for leggings. A very particular sort of leggings: the kind lined with fake fur and printed with high-contrast patterns of snowflakes and reindeer.
Yes, you read that correctly. Reindeer.
These leggings are extremely warm; I owned some myself and wore them around the house and when I went camping. I would never have worn them around town, but an awful lot of people – men and women alike – did so regularly.
Perhaps it’s an issue of semantics. Team Leggings-Are-Pants does not translate readily into Mongolian because there is no separate word for leggings, or for tights: all are called өмд. I wish I had thought to cut out pictures of pants, leggings, and tights in various shades of yellow, orange, pink and purple, and asked Mongolians to sort them according to each designation. I suspect the test would result in a lot of confused, frustrated Mongolians and a random scattering of answers. The Mongolian word for orange is улбар шар, or reddish yellow, while purple is usually called хөх ягаан, or dark pink. Conceptually, the colors don’t seem to exist for most Mongolians, and so they have a hard time applying what seems to be an arbitrary distinction. The same might very well be true of pants and leggings.
Or it might just be another case of Mongolian fashion sense differing wildly from its American counterpart. Some Americans are fans of glitzy wardrobes, to be sure, but Mongolians bring the preoccupation to a scale I’d never seen before.
High heels + rhinestones + leopard print: the most Mongol-Fabulous shoes I’ve ever seen.
I don’t know how walk through ice and snow in stilettos without breaking an ankle, but my coworkers treated it as a matter of course. Expats readers, how does the local fashion sense compare with your own tastes?
Everywhere But Home 