Costume designer Nachiket Barve on winning the National Film Award for Tanhaji: I feel honoured. This film is very close to my heart

Fashion and costume designer Nachiket Barve was pleasantly surprised when he started getting congratulatory messages and calls on Friday evening - after he was announced as the winner of National Film Award for Best Costume Designer (shared with Mahesh Sherla) for Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior. “It is a very pleasant surprise and I feel over the moon. National Film Award is one of the most prestigious honour one can ever think of receiving and it is selected by an eminent jury.This news has come as a pleasant surprise,” says the designer, who also runs his own fashion label apart from working as a costume designer in films.

Nachiket says that what makes his honour even more special is the fact that he received it for a project that is very close to his heart. “I did over two years of research for the costumes of this film. When you are creating costumes for a project that has so much history, you have a huge responsibility to be historically accurate and cinematically beautiful. I can say this on behalf of everyone who worked on this project, that this award is a recognition of all the hard work that went into creating the costumes and using them as an element of storytelling in the movie,” he says. The designer also adds that he focussed on a lot of Indian craft revival while working on this project. “There was a lot of textile and leather revival that happened in the process of creating costumes for this movie. I visited so many museums across the world, pulled out archives and went through a lot of private textile collections to know facts and then worked on the costumes. To create costumes for an iconic character like Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, we used many textiles like Banarasi brocade, matka silk, Chanderi etc. For designing jewellery, we used 400-year-old moulds and got in touch with the family that had these ancestral moulds from the royal family,” shares the designer.
He says that this recognition will encourage him to work towards storytelling through costumes. “At present, I am working on three more projects and my attempt will be to use my craft and skills to add to the storytelling in cinema,” says Nachiket.