The Evenki coat is built out of two materials in tension. The garment itself is soft: reindeer or elk hide, cut generously, often with long fringes falling from the sleeves and the hem. Onto it is sewn a considerable quantity of iron, and the placement of that iron is not random. Observers who recorded these coats in the field noted that the plates and pendants across the chest and back correspond to parts of a body, ribs along the flanks, a line down the spine, long bones on the arms, so that the wearer is dressed in a skeleton.
Beyond the bones, the coats carry figures. Birds appear repeatedly, as do fish, small animals and human forms, cast or cut from iron and hung so that they swing. Discs, tubes, chains and bells fill the remaining space. Together they make the coat heavy, in some collected cases tens of kilograms, and loud, so that any movement produces a continuous ringing.
Neither the weight nor the noise is incidental. An account of a practitioner working in such a coat describes someone carrying a great deal of metal and generating sound with the whole body, not someone in a costume. The garment does part of the work.
Every coat is different. There is no pattern book and no standard, and the fittings on a particular garment record what its owner acquired, was given or had made across a working life.