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Coming Home - A Journey with Saruul Fischer through Mongolia

December 21, 2014

Saruul Fischer has built a bridge to her homeland. Homesickness originally gave her the idea for her "Edelziege" label. Today, her eco-fashions from Mongolian goat hair can even be seen at Fashion Week.

https://p.dw.com/p/1DlB5

Coming Home - A Journey with Saruul Fischer through Mongolia

Classic cuts, subtle colors, and a cashmere look: in her studio in Plauen in Saxony, 39-year-old Saruul Fischer designs both basic and cutting edge ecological fashions. She has her designs made in small runs in Mongolia from 100 percent cashmere wool. Saruul Fischer’s label “Edelziege” is indeed a bridge to her original homeland.

In 1986, eleven-year-old Saruul and her parents moved from Ulan Bator to East Germany. Her father worked as an interpreter and Saruul went to school. Then the Berlin Wall fell, and hard times followed. Saruul’s father died and the family had to struggle through. Saruul studied communications, got married and moved to Plauen in Saxony, but she couldn’t find work in her field. Then she came up with the idea of “Edelziege” a name both cheeky and a bit provocative but still chic. And it worked: Twice a year, Saruul goes to Mongolia, where she has her designs made up in small factories in Ulan Bator. In addition to environmentally-friendly production methods, she also wants to ensure fair conditions for her workers: Mongolia has undergone some drastic changes, and the advent of the free market has brought more and more families from the countryside into the city.

05.12.2014 DW Feature Expedition Heimat Mongolei Saruul + Landschaft
Some of Saruul’s relatives run a summer camp for tourists on the lake. Winter temperatures can go as low as -40 degrees Celsius, so they have now packed up, leaving just a few tents to be broken down and put into storage.

The Mongolian capital Ulan Bator has developed rapidly and today has little to do with the city of the fashion designer’s childhood memories. Only on her journeys into the countryside to visit her mother and the farmers from whom she obtains the wool for her label does she find the bit of home she sometimes still dreams about in Germany. “People are modest and live in harmony with nature. That's what I miss most in Germany.” But climate change, the migration of the younger generation to the cities and the fight for resources are also threatening the rural idyll.

05.12.2014 DW Feature Expedition Heimat Mongolei Sommerhütte der Familie
A few hours’ drive from Ulan Bator: an idyllic landscape of rolling hills typical of Eastern Mongolia. Saruul’s mother has both summer and winter homes here.

Saruul Fischer shows us around her homeland. We visit the capital where she grew up, she shows us her old school and we go to an orphanage that she wants to support. We travel by car over the bumpy roads through the endless expanse of grassland to the Great Lakes in western Mongolia. We sleep in yurts with relatives and farmers. Saruul Fischer introduces us to a life far from civilization, which will soon perhaps no longer exist.

05.12.2014 DW Feature Expedition Heimat Mongolei Steppe - Pferdehirten und -züchter
The mares have been milked and the foals fed: the drovers take a lunch break, meeting and talking about the weather.

What does Saruul Fischer think of the changes in the land of her birth? What challenges is Mongolia facing? What is left of the empathy with nature she remembers so well from her childhood?


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