In these photos Lena Popova, is wearing a dress made by Mariana Marakhovsky together with her mother, Zoya Kuzmina. They are all Sakha, born and raised in the Republic of Sakha Yakutia, located in northeastern Siberia, Russia. Lena is from the village of Aryylaakh in Churapcha ulus (district), Mariana is from the town of Pokrovsk in Khanalas ulus, and her mother Zoya is from Bala in Verkhoyansk ulus. The Republic is the coldest inhabited place on Earth.

Lena is currently doing a PhD in Geography at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Her research is titled “Integrating natural sciences and Arctic indigenous knowledge in the anthropocene era, with a focus on climate change.”

Mariana also lives in Switzerland. She is an artist and designer holding a degree in Decorative and applied arts and traditional crafts of the indigenous peoples of Russia,  with a particular interest in traditional sewing and ornamentation  techniques. Her mother, Zoya, although not formally trained as a  designer, embodies what Mariana describes: “In every Sakha family, there  is someone who sews”.

The dress Lena is wearing is called a Haladaay, and the violet jacket called a hahyachchyk – traditional summer garments worn by Sakha women. Its history is closely linked to cultural and historical changes that began in the mid-17th century, when lighter Russian fabrics first became available along new trade routes.  Before that, Sakha clothing was made from thin leather. Although the Haladaay is now considered traditional clothing, its current form was fully developed in the 19th century.

However what  Sakha women did with the new silhouette, was entirely their own: they  embedded cosmology, ornamentation and meaning into the shape of the  dress. As Mariana puts it, the design is not only beautiful, but also  meaningful. Underlying motifs – circles representing the Sun, number of stripes and ornamental structures – are fundamental and relatively consistent across the Sakha culture. Their visual language has been catalogued by Master artisans such as Mandar Uus, a respected blacksmith who compiled a library of Sakha ornamentation from museum artefacts and, as Lena notes, from his solitary journeys into the taiga and close observation of nature.

The jewellery is equally layered. Traditionally, the headband, brow piece, and  necklace that Lena is wearing in the photo would be made of silver,  forged by blacksmiths – a male craft that, within Sakha cosmology,  carries particular weight,  as blacksmiths are believed to work with both the material and the  invisible world. Lena’s set is a contemporary reinterpretation, woven  from horsehair rather than cast in silver. This is a recent innovation:  horsehair was historically used for ropes, harnesses and other practical purposes, but today artisans also use it for hats, bags and jewelry.

The horse holds profound cultural significance in Sakha belief: Dzhehögöy Aiyy, the horse deity and patron of horses and the Sakha people, is associated with prosperity, physical strength and skills. These pieces are therefore seen as carrying protective power, and for Lena, owning a full silver set one day remains a dream, as such pieces are very expensive.

The Haladaay is most visibly worn during Yhyakh – the celebration of prosperity, abundance, and fertility of the Earth during the summer solstice. However, silver earrings, rings, and bracelets are  part of everyday life, and a growing wave of young Sakha designers –  including sportswear labels such as Tanas and Tetim – are embroidering Sakha ornament into hoodies, dresses, and streetwear,  allowing a sense of identity to be carried into everyday life. This  openness to change is, for Mariana, close to the core of the Sakha  sensibility: “Our design is like a sponge. When something new appears in the world – a new idea or technology - we absorb it and combine it with our culture”.

That sensibility is not without friction. Mariana once appeared at a fashion show in a sleeveless black-and-blue Haladaay made from mesh fabric, at a time when dresses were almost universally bright and floral. Her mother warned her she looked like a crow and said that black is too gloomy for a Haladaay. But the following year, black dresses were everywhere. Within Sakha community, there are main shared underlying rules and principles in design, but also real room for innovation – partly, Lena and Mariana suggest, because Sakha philosophy holds that nothing stays stable and everything changes

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Sewing  is inseparable from family life. Mariana describes evenings spent  gathered around her grandmother, who softened fur with a small machine,  while the women of the household beaded the tops of unty/eterbes (winter boots), cut fabric, stitched embroidery, and told stories. “I don’t remember when I first took a needle in my hand,” – she says. The collective nature of making – grandmother, mother, aunts, daughters – means that a single garment is almost always the work of several hands, and often of several generations

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Today,  despite globalization, Sakha culture is actively evolving: some  cartoons are dubbed into Sakha, Wikipedia has a Sakha edition, and apps  are teaching the language to a new generation, even as Russian and  English-language internet content pulls in the other direction. For Lena  and Mariana, garments like this Haladaay, and the relationships woven around them, are part of that continuity. “I am proud,” Lena says. “I am very proud to be Sakha”.