This isn't a very useful skill but it is interesting, I guess

[cimorene]

Thanks to years on Ravelry and years in Finnish language and culture classes for immigrants, I can usually tell that a woman is Russian by what she’s wearing.

(This does not apply to Russian-speakers from the USSR diaspora, eg Estonia, Lithuania/Latvia, and the Ukraine.)

Comments

[brownbetty]

Are there any identifiable tells, or is it just an ineffable "you know it when you see it"?

[cimorene]

Somewhere in between there. I couldn't exactly explain it in the abstract, but I can point out the clues in a given instance.

There's a tendency to what you could call more femininity and more dressiness, skirts and heels and purses that read old-fashioned or oddly business-wear leaning to my eye, for example. You see a lot of straightened hair or blown-out styles, simple jewelry of the type worn by the working class women in my extended family, no-makeup makeup with a sort of twist that somehow is reminiscent of 10-30 years ago (colors or styles maybe?).

There's a much higher likelihood that they'll have sunglasses on in their Ravelry photos.

Russian fashion also likes a lot of gold-toned metal, a lot of buckles, a lot of pleather if leather isn't available, and a much higher probabiliy of any given outfit being worn with leather or leather-look tall boots of a color or style that looks odd with the outfit.