MOSCOW, August 28. /TASS Correspondent Yulia Bochkareva/. Winter in Yakutia begins in October and continues until the end of April. In January, temperatures may fall to minus 60 degrees. Our regular jackets or boots are no good there. For centuries, the North's peoples have been improving clothes to make them warm and comfortable. Nowadays, modern technologies add to those traditions. Ethnographer, art critic, technologist Lyudmila Rastorgueva, without exaggeration, has devoted her life to this work.
Traditions and technologies
Lyudmila was born in the Arctic - in Yakutia's Bulunsky District, in the Bykov Cape village, washed by Neelov Bay and the Laptev Sea waters. Her father, a local fishery team leader, passed away before she was two years old, and the family moved to Central Yakutia's Tattinsky District. At the age of six, the elder sister taught Lyudmila to make dresses for dolls. At the age of 13, the girl made clothes for herself and for sisters.
She wanted to take a course of fashion design, but at that time the region did not offer that direction. "The local authority advised me to take a course to become a clothing manufacturing engineer. So I became a student at the Far Eastern Technological Institute (nowadays - the Vladivostok State University - TASS)," she said. That was the time she began to study Yakutia's sewing traditions.
Back in the Soviet times, she had an idea to use deer wool as an insulator. Scientists in those years were developing various professional outwear standards. The models they were designing were supposed to be cold resistant clothing.
"When working there, I began to use our traditions along with modern technologies. In 1985, I became a post-graduate student and had several inventions, including a deer wool insulator and a half mask - to replace fur boa of squirrel tails, with which people used to protect breath and face in frosts. I also made shoe insoles of herbs, though together with an ion-exchange nanocomposite. Such an insole keeps regular humidity and creates a light heating effect. In 2009, I improved it by adding bactericidal features," she says.
Over almost 40 years of work, Lyudmila has initiated 20 inventions that are registered in six countries - the USSR/Russia, the USA, Canada, Sweden, Norway and Finland. In addition to the half mask, insoles and deer wool insulator, she has developed a bactericidal chemisorption cloth (a new type of filter materials for cleaning air from toxic chemical components), and also has registered scientific research mathematical models, in particular for calculations in making insulated outfits. All the inventions have certain prototypes in traditional household items the indigenous peoples are using.
Reviving traditions
In 1991, Lyudmila founded in Yakutsk a scientific and production company, dubbed Hotugu Tanas ('Clothing of the North' in Yakut), to revive the local indigenous peoples' national clothing in new artistic styles and to produce warm clothing. That was the beginning of systematic studies of the North's traditions and their use in combination with modern technologies.
At the same time, she continued collecting materials on traditional clothing: she studied museum collections, and not only in Russia.
"Foreign museums have many objects of the indigenous peoples' tangible culture. Some items do not have analogues in Russia. For example, original costumes of the Siberian indigenous peoples (the Jesup North Pacific Expedition in 1897-1902) were brought to the Museum of Natural History in New York City in 1902," she said.
In 1995, she went to America to study unique exhibits. Prior to that, her Hotugu Tanas business won the competition of the Sakha-American educational business center, which back then worked in Yakutsk. The winner received a free accommodation in Anchorage, Alaska, and a course of marketing, accounting and management at the University of Alaska. After Alaska she headed for the American Museum of Natural History in New York. For as long as one month, she was taking pictures of authentic costumes of Yakutia's indigenous peoples that were kept in the museum's collection.
"Between 1983 and 2000, when I was working on my paper in ethnography, I studied costumes and their history at the Yakut Institute of Language, Literature and History, as well as at the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Additionally, as an art critic and technologist, I studied artistic and technological features of national costumes at the Moscow Academy of Light Industry," she said. "My paper was the first attempt of a systematic interdisciplinary study of the national costumes of our peoples. This explains why at that time I was able to access the most authoritative scientific bases in Moscow."
At the USSR Clothing Industry Research Institute and at the Healthcare Ministry's Institute of Biophysics (presently the Burnazyan Federal Medical Biophysical Center), she used a climatic chamber for physiological and hygienic tests, made laboratory assessments of physical-mechanical and hygienic properties of the ethnic clothing's materials. Field studies took place in Yakutia's Nizhnekolymsky District.
In 1998, Lyudmila was awarded Yakutia's State Prize in science and technology for the revival of the national clothing of the indigenous peoples and for the use of folk experience and new technologies. As for the work on a two-volume encyclopedic album about national costumes of the indigenous peoples in Yakutia in the 18th - early 20th centuries, her contribution was results of earlier studies and some photographic materials. The book is ready for printing.
No frost is cold
Thanks to deer wool, jackets, overalls and vests made with her technology, are highly insulated - they are up to six times warmer than other domestic or foreign outwear.
"We get deer wool from the Sahabult Company in Salekhard, Yakutia. The insulation is produced like polyether - in bolts. It contains deer wool and changeable components that are chosen depending on the operating conditions. For example, non-flammable components are used for firefighters," Lyudmila said.
The clothes do not look bulky. In a branded jumpsuit for climbers, which was only about 1 cm thick, extreme athletes in 2017 conquered the Elbrus, where the air temperature dropped to -43° C and the wind speed was up to 30 m/s.
"Standard outwear is to be worn in up to -41° C with heating breaks every three hours. In our clothes, people will be thermally comfortable in frosts up to -67° C without any interruptions and in any physical activity. Noteworthy, our outfits are much lighter and thinner," she added.
The membrane prevents wind and removes moisture, and due to the components the clothing remains light and thin. For example, a hooded jacket of sizes L or XL for height of 176 cm weighs approximately 1.1 kg.
Lyudmila's company produces overalls for work, as well as sleeping bags, gauntlets, socks, hygienic reusable half masks with removable filters, and innovative half masks to protect face in winter. The plans are to make tents and yarangas (nomads' tents) using the branded insulation.
In the spring of 2023, Russia's Ministry of Emergency Situations tested a set of branded clothing during the Safe Arctic - 2023 exercises and afterwards recommended the clothing for the ministry's professional emergency rescue units. The company also cooperates with Alrosa (a diamond producer) and its subsidiaries.
Until recently, the company worked in Moscow, but in 2022 Lyudmila decided to return to Yakutsk. "Many companies now are placing orders for workwear. By winter, we want to design household clothes - coats, jackets and trousers. I plan to organize here a technological base, where in the future we will survey demand from various industries to work accordingly," she said. "In a way, the company continues the traditions of our ancestors, to pass them on so that Yakutia's younger generation could develop them further on."