staying snuggly
Clinging, itchy, and disastrously uncool, thermal underwear ranks among the worst horrors of a Moscow winter. element offers an alternative.
TEXT ROWAN KENNEDY feedback
Forget falling over on the ice, coming across the frozen corpse of your neighborhood vagrant in the perekhod, and the long months without a glimpse of the sun: of all the hardships and humiliations of a winter spent in Moscow, thermal long johns are the king. They cling to you under your clothes. They itch. They collect sweat and stink worse than a monkey’s armpits. And worst of all, should anyone ever catch sight of you wearing them, the humiliation will be harder to live down than the time when you peed in the pool as a kid and were hauled up in front of the entire class to explain yourself. In fact, the indignity involved in wearing long johns is far worse than the physical discomfort. If wearing skimpy lingerie (as I have often heard claimed) helps women to feel confident and attractive no matter what they have on over it, can you imagine the psychological damage inflicted by a pair of woolly long johns under your designer jeans? Not to worry, however, as modern scientists have been rubbing their heads together and come up with several new and more sophisticated ways of staying warm. First up are down jackets, beloved of arctic explorers and Himalayan mountaineers. A highly sensible option, based on the impeccable logic that you’re never warmer or more comfortable than when lying in bed under your duvet. Wearing your duvet to work or school would be impractical, however. This being the case, why not get yourself a mini, wearable duvet to keep you warm all day? Sportmaster has a wide range starting from a mere 1,990 rubles. Polar Fleece is an ingenious wool substitute made from PET fibers, meaning that it can in fact be produced entirely from recycled plastic. So it’s good for the environment as well as for warming your nether regions. It’s soft, breathable, and weighs a fraction of what wool weighs. Sportmaster stocks fleece trousers from 1,290 and sweaters from 990 rubles. Gloves and hats are also available, from around 250 rubles. Putting an electric heating element down your trousers may sound about as safe as climbing a flagpole in an electrical storm, but Gerbing’s, an American company that produces electronically heated clothing, claims that it’s a perfectly rational way of staying warm. The bizarrely named www.badger.ru sells their heated trousers starting from 6,000 rubles and jackets from 6,500. Also available are gloves (from 3,874 rubles) and socks (from 1,482 rubles). These work on the hair-raising principle that you connect them together and then plug yourself into a socket, or even the cigarette lighter of your car or snowmobile if you’re out and about. A great choice for people whose comfort is more important than personal safety. Finally, Valenki and Ushanki: alright, so these aren’t exactly high-tech, but they’ve been successfully preventing Siberians from losing their extremities to frost for hundreds of years. Ask an Evenk reindeer herder: when it’s -57 C outside, a good fur hat and a pair of enormous felt boots are the only thing that’ll keep your ears and toes from turning black. Just don’t try to wear them to Dyagilev. The cheapest valenki in town can be bought from the store of the Bitsevskaya Valenki Factory for around 400 rubles, depending on the size, while ushanki start at 1,500 rubles at the Izmailovsky market. Don’t forget to bargain. |
