When most people think of Milan, they think fashion. The 2026 Winter Olympics Parade of Nations served as a reminder for why Milan is the fashion capital of the world. While most nations were outfitted in some form of generic puffer jacket and sneaker, some small nations used their athletic uniforms to present something more layered than your typical winter sports attire: garments rooted in cultural history and national identity.
The Parade of Nations is one of the few moments in sports that has nothing to do with competition. For a few hours, the most competitive arena in the world is taken over by spectacle. The flags, the music, the choreographed march through a stadium full of cameras. Every country gets the same amount of space and the same international audience of billions, and the only thing that differentiates them is how they choose to show up. Most nations walk through the motions. A few walk with something to say.
Amid the sea of mediocrity, two nations — standing a total of five athletes strong — stood apart, not only for their aesthetic impact, but also for the deeply rooted stories embedded in their clothing. At every Olympic Games, uniform design is quietly treated as a marketing opportunity. The Games are a chance for massive retailers to dress athletes in their logos in front of a global audience and walk away with exposure. Rather than functioning as a subtle advertising campaign for major labels, the smaller, lesser known designers of the Mongolian and Haitian uniforms leveraged the international Olympic stage to showcase something more than creative fashion: culture that refuses to be flattened into a logo.
Mongolia
Mongolia’s Olympic uniforms accomplished something that most delegations don’t even attempt: clothing that doubled as a tribute to centuries of the country’s rich history. Goyol Cashmere, a family-run label founded in 2005 and based in Ulaanbaatar, the nation’s capital, made Mongolia’s uniforms. The choice of material cuts straight to the heart of what their uniforms were meant to represent: Cashmere isn’t a “flex” for Mongolians — it’s a lifeline. For generations, nomadic families have worn it through winters that bottom out at minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit in a country where the landscape offers little shelter and the cold is not a season so much as a permanent condition. That’s not heritage for heritage’s sake. That’s survival that eventually became craft, and craft that eventually became identity. Bringing that material to one of the most internationally watched stages on Earth isn’t a fashion decision; it’s a statement that Mongolia’s greatest asset has always been its resilience.
The centerpiece of each look was the deel, a traditional wrapped robe that has been a staple of Mongolian dress for centuries. Wide sleeves, a structured high collar, the whole garment cinched at the waist with a flowing sash — it was engineered for a specific kind of life. Nomadic riders needed something that could insulate them against the brutal cold while still allowing the full range of motion that supported their equestrian lifestyle. The deel solved both problems at once, performing so well that the design has barely changed for centuries. The Olympic version retained every bit of that silhouette and rendered it in fine cashmere, layered textures, a dramatic drape and a regal profile that felt ceremonial without feeling theatrical. That’s the genuinely hard part. A lot of countries attempt this kind of cultural tribute and end up looking like they raided a museum gift shop. Mongolia didn’t. The deel looked like something you would wear — if the occasion was extraordinary enough to call for it.
Strip away the cashmere and the ceremony, and it’s the details that tell you the story. Athletes wore gutal, the traditional leather boots made recognizable by their slightly upturned toes. That curve looks ornamental at first glance, but it wasn’t designed for aesthetics; it evolved specifically to keep a rider’s foot locked securely in a stirrup while crossing Mongolia’s vast, unforgiving steppe. Durable, close-fitted and built for rough terrain, they stood in sharp contrast to the sleek athletic boots and sneakers that dominated the rest of the parade. Where other nations dressed their athletes from the ankle down like they were about to compete, Mongolia’s delegation looked like they were preparing to attend the Met Gala.
Topping the looks were structured, fur-trimmed conical hats inspired by 13th- through 15th-century Mongol Empire warrior helmets. Stiff-brimmed and deliberately imposing, they drew upon the traditional silhouette of a Mongol warrior helmet while rendering that martial legacy into a modern and formal display. Together, the gutal and the Mongol Empire-inspired headpieces did exactly what good accessories are supposed to do — they didn’t decorate the outfit, they completed it, grounding the fine cashmere garments in a visual language that required no translation.
That specificity is what separates this from the usual opening ceremony pageantry. Most delegations show up in sponsor-approved athletic wear and claim it’s national pride. Mongolia walked out in something that felt genuinely lived in — clothing with actual memory, each element tracing back to a way of life still practiced across the country’s vast interior: the deel worn by nomads on horseback, the boots built for the steppe, the hat that once told a stranger everything they needed to know about who you were and where you came from. None of it was decorative. All of it was deliberate. That’s rare, and a lot more powerful than anything a branding consultant could have dreamed up.
Haiti
Haiti sent only two athletes to the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics — and they still managed to produce one of the most visually appealing uniforms at the entire Games.
The designs came from Stella Jean, an Italian Haitian designer who also dressed Haiti’s delegation at the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics. What she brought to the snow was something the Winter Games rarely witness: genuine defiance sewn into fabric. These were the only hand-painted uniforms at the Games. Not printed, not digitally rendered — hand-painted. On a stage built for technical performance wear and corporate sponsorship deals, Haiti showed up with something that belonged in an art gallery.
The uniforms’ styles differed by gender, but both sported the same hand-painted design. Although both of Haiti’s athletes were male, the original design of the women’s uniform featured a puffer skirt paired with a tignon, a vibrantly colored headwrap that has been part of Haitian culture for centuries. The men wore a structured ski coat and pants, both carrying the same painted design. Everyone wore matching puffer snow boots. The unifying image painted across each uniform was a riderless red horse set against a tropical blue sky, taken directly from the work of Edouard Duval-Carrié, the Haitian-born painter and sculptor whose 2006 work, titled “Toussaint Louverture,” provided the artistic inspiration for the whole collection.
The tignon alone carries enough history to fill a separate article. In 18th-century colonial colonies — such as Haiti — tignon laws mandated that Black women cover their hair as a deliberate act of humiliation designed to mark them as separate from and beneath white women. Rather than wear the headwrap as a mark of shame, women responded by making them as extravagant as possible with vibrant colors, expensive fabrics, jewels and ribbons. They took the instrument of their oppression and turned it into something defiant and powerful. The tignon is now a symbol of resilience and self-expression, still worn today as an act of ancestral honor. Jean putting it on an Olympic uniform wasn’t solely decorative. It was a commemoration of the nation’s history up until this moment.
The red horse carries its own weight too, though its presence on the final uniform came at a cost. Haiti’s original design featured Toussaint Louverture — the man who led Haiti to becoming the world’s first post-slavery Black republic — riding the horse, holding a snake in place of a sword. The International Olympic Committee blocked it on the grounds of political neutrality. In Haiti’s Vodou tradition, the snake would have been a reference to Damballa, the ancient serpent loa representing wisdom, creation, purity and the sky — a primordial spirit believed to have formed the cosmos itself. The IOC saw politics. Haiti called it history and national pride.
What remained after the IOC’s intervention was the horse without its rider. Haiti’s uniforms were deprived of its most explicit revolutionary icon representing their people’s resilience and enduring spirit. But what remained was still unmistakably symbolic. There’s an argument to be made that the absence of the rider makes the imagery more powerful. A riderless horse in the context of Haitian history doesn’t suggest vacancy. It suggests that the rider’s spirit is so large it can’t be contained in a single image and, here, that no one has ever managed to fully strip Haiti of its history. For a country built on its refusal to be silenced, even a censored image finds a way to speak.
Fashion on the Olympic stage
What every great Olympic uniform shares, underneath the flags and fabric, is the same core conviction: clothing remembers things. The best uniforms don’t just represent a country — they carry it. Its history, its hardships, the things it refused to let go of and the things it refused to let be taken. They show up on a global stage and ask to be understood on their own terms, not translated into the visual language of athletic sponsorship and broadcast-friendly branding. Milano Cortina 2026 offered a reminder that the Parade of Nations, for all its pageantry, is still one of the few times a country gets to tailor how it wants to be seen by the rest of the world. The delegations that take that seriously — that treat the uniform as something worthy of speaking through — are the ones you remember long after the Games are over.
Daily Arts Contributor Bella Jamerino can be reached at bellajam@umich.edu.