A costume is often the first thing you read about a character — before a word is spoken, the audience has already placed them in a world. Whether it’s the Battle of Sinhagad in 1670 or the Kadamba Dynasty’s reign over ancient coastal Karnataka, that world has to be built thread by thread, often from scattered or non-existent reference.
Fashion designers working on period films aren’t simply dressing actors; they are reconstructing eras, civilisations, sometimes entire belief systems, from leather, cotton and imagination.
Here, the designers behind some of Indian cinema’s most inventive period films — Ponniyin Selvan: I, Jodhaa Akbar, Baahubali, Kantara: Chapter 1 and Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior — break down what it took to get those looks right.
The real challenge was working within only five colours for the Rajput clan and five for the Mughals. Finding a fresh permutation from just those 10 shades was the task. Hrithik’s (Roshan’s) pagdi (turban) wouldn’t sit right, no matter what we tried; we brought in 21 pagdi-makers from across India before he got thoroughly frustrated with the whole process.
Aishwarya’s (Rai Bachchan) jewellery weighed a ton — every time I walked in with the platter, she’d sigh, “Oh, she’s arrived with the jewellery again”. We ended up stitching it directly onto her blouse and clothes so it would sit effortlessly.
Because Jodhaa Akbar was shot largely in natural light, I couldn’t use brocades or raw silks — they wouldn’t have caught the light the way we wanted. So, we recreated everything in cotton instead. Hrithik wouldn’t let anyone else touch his turban, so I changed its colours by hand, through a stitching technique, using the same one turban throughout the film.
My background in stitching and fashion made that possible. For me, it’s second nature. I’ve cut things up on set and reconstructed them on the spot more times than I can count. You need that skill in this job.
Every character in Ponniyin Selvan: I was challenging, but if I had to name the toughest one to crack, it would be Vanthiyathevan, played by Karthi — and ironically, it was the least elaborate costume. It had to look like the easiest one, and the easiest ones are usually hardest for me.
Vanthiyathevan is the sutradhar, or narrator, of the story — we see him in almost every other frame. Unlike the other characters, who kept changing, he needed one iconic look that held for most of the film. He’s also the character who does the most physically in costume: riding, fighting, climbing, travelling, going underwater, moving through forests. So, we couldn’t design something that only looked beautiful when he was standing still — it had to behave like clothing and armour both.
A large part of the costume was leather, and finding the right material was difficult. If he had to wear this one piece for so long, I wanted it to tell a story through every fold, crease and bit of wear. The texture had to shift with the environment — darker underwater, browner in sunlight. The material itself had to narrate.
We also textured the shoulders heavily to show Karthi as a strong warrior, but underneath, we built in a thin layer of armour, almost like a second skin. Finding the balance between something that looked good and something that worked practically took a long time — we worked with wonderful armourers, testing pieces in water and over fire before landing on the right material.
The biggest challenge was making the core costume interesting enough to carry across two films without audiences tiring of it. The armour had layers — we could remove the shoulder piece and add drapes to it later on. Ultimately, the costume had to live the life Vanthiyathevan was living.
The real test came once we started shooting the war sequences. The action was complex, so the armour had to be light and flexible enough for the actors to move freely, while still reading as metal on screen — striking that balance was probably the biggest challenge.
There was also the sheer scale of it. We had a huge number of people to dress, and every costume had to feel consistent with the world of the film, all while making sure the actors could still perform comfortably.
A lot of our visual references came from Amar Chitra Katha, illustrations many of us had grown up with, and a natural starting point for building the world and its characters. But the process was really about trial and error. Some costumes looked good on paper but didn’t hold up once they were on the actors: the proportions were off, or they simply didn’t work in a real setting. So, we kept going back and reworking them.
For the armour, we built near-identical versions in three different materials, depending on how they’d be used: fibre for scenes where the actor was mostly standing or walking, and different types of leather for the action sequences — hard leather where the armour needed to be sturdy, soft leather wherever the actor needed more movement.
Whatever the material, all three had to look consistent on screen; the audience should never feel that an actor is suddenly in different armour just because it changed underneath.
We were building a world set in the fourth century, for which almost no direct visual reference exists. Tribal characters, royalty, warriors, commoners, local and foreign traders — each group needed its own approach while still convincingly belonging to the same world.
The foreign traders were the hardest. They had to read instantly as people who’d travelled from distant lands, while still sitting naturally within the film’s visual world. Our process ran on three principles: research, relevance and authenticity.
We drew on ancient sculptures, books, historical references, regional traditions and every other source we could find. But specifically for armour from the South Canara region of that period, authentic visual reference was scarce. So, rather than recreating from a single source, we studied what little existed, mixed and matched references, worked out what could plausibly have existed in that environment, and developed our own design language for the film.
The tribal armour, especially, was built in categories rather than one uniform look, designed around each character’s age, role, physicality and arc. Younger tribal warriors wore more leather-based armour; older characters and the women wore pieces made from natural fibres and locally inspired organic materials. That gave every group its own identity while keeping them recognisably part of the same tribal world.
Designing the armour was only half of it. It also had to be functional, since the actors were running, fighting and falling in it through demanding action sequences. So, we worked on weight, flexibility, movement, comfort and safety, without giving up the look.
The royal warriors brought their own hierarchy: a regular soldier, the Senadhipathi, the king and the heroine couldn’t all wear the same armour — the costume had to visually communicate rank and importance. Each was individually designed, with its own silhouette, detailing, materials and scale, while all of them still spoke a common design language to mark them as part of the same kingdom.
For the rest of the tribal costumes, we worked with raw, handwoven fabrics, natural textures, vegetable-dyed materials and organic draping — relying on wrapping, tying and layering rather than heavily constructed garments. Beads, shells, seeds, bones and carved wooden elements became part of their adornment and ritual identity.
Royalty, by contrast, was an entirely different world — richer fabrics, layered drapes, intricate detailing, embroidery, jewellery and symbolic motifs, all used to establish lineage, power and hierarchy.
Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, played by Sharad Kelkar, is a legendary Maratha warrior who borders on the divine for many of his followers, so the costume needed a larger-than-life aura, while still staying historically accurate in its textiles, leatherwork, material and jewellery, as far as we know them.
There was plenty of temptation, since I also work with embroidery as a fashion designer. But as a costume designer, I didn’t put any embroidery on him at all — just the richest, most beautiful Indian textiles. The palette had a colour story of its own, almost like an opalescent pearl.
He radiates a certain divinity and optimism through the film, which is why we kept to the most muted creams, ivories, beiges and gold. His look also had to sit a notch above Tanhaji Malusare’s — both men are from the same region, but Shivaji still had to look like their king.
Even his headgear was handmade by a specialist from Pune, and the conch necklace was checked by a historian to make sure the thread was accurate. It wasn’t just reverence for a character, but for a piece of cinematic history.
Saif Ali Khan’s Udaybhan was another character altogether. Saif is a consummate actor and a joy to work with — his costume had about 24 individual elements, right down to shoes that had to look historically accurate but still let him do modern action sequences. Udaybhan is of Rajput origin serving the Mughal court, which gave us room to draw on a mix of influences — textiles from Banaras, the Silk Route, chanderis and brocades. I kept it regal and tonal. In his introduction scene at Aurangzeb’s court, the costume is texturally rich, but you still can’t take your eyes off his face. That’s where a costume designer earns their balance.