Are Mongolians fashionable?

One would think that citizens of a landlocked country with little access to basic items such as wheat would be similarly confined when it comes to fashion. Not so. Mongolians are incredibly fashionable.

I don't mean that Mongolians are wearing knee length shorts, or whatever is trendy in New York right now, but they are very conscious of how they look. UB has a large young population, as anyone who can comes into the city for university, and young people are likely to stay after they finish school. What this means is that you have a huge number of men and women in their late teens, early 20s who are unmarried and have disposable incomes.

The girls tend to wear outfits that people in the US might wear to go out on the weekends, or on special occasions. Women wear high heels almost all the time, and glittery tops are popular, as are short skirts. Men tend to wear button-down shirts and to have a generally sartorial look about them.

Cell phones are the key accessory for any outfit. I bought a used cell phone upon arriving in Mongolia for around $30. It's one of the original Nokia pre-flip phones that everyone used to have, six years ago. It works fine, all the controls are in English, and it gets good reception. Mongolians, however, practically pity me for having such an old phone. People here tend to buy new cell phones about once every six months, and they spend huge amounts of money: many cell phones here cost around $300 -- that's 25% of the average Mongolian's salary. On some level, I'm embarrassed for having such an ugly phone, and I want to say to people "I have a razr at home in New York, I swear!" but, at the same time, being a foreigner here I feel somewhat immune to social mores.

My boss recently, who is in her late 30s, was talking to me about the obsession with clothes and phones here in Mongolia. She was saying that Mongolians by nature are adaptive people; they are nomadic and used to change. They can adopt other cultures very quickly, almost unconsciously. She worries though that the adoption of style and image is occurring on a very superficial level. "I keep thinking they are going to wake up one day," she says, "and realize that they have no sense of who they really are." But then again, she says, maybe they won't. Either way, for now, they look great.