With Kangana Ranaut having spoken of Manikarnika: The Queen Of Jhansi as her passion project, there was evidently little scope for error when replicating the warrior queen on screen. And while the actor put in months of toil to learn horse-riding and sword-fighting to do justice to her act, costume designer Neeta Lulla too left no stone unturned to make Ranaut a visual delight.

"We worked for six months to design the costumes; two of them were spent on research work, and the remaining four, on trials and look tests," Lulla tells mid-day, adding that all she had as reference points for the task assigned to her were photographs. "We came across visual references through paintings and illustrations, but the challenge was to understand and study them. The look had to be believable and true to the era that we were depicting."