March is turning out to be a month of celebrations for fashion designer Neeta Lulla. She brought in her birthday with a big bash a few days back and now she has been jointly awarded a National Award with Niharika Khan for costume design for the Marathi film Bal Gandharva.
Though Neeta has styled several regional and Bollywood films in the past, this is the first time she has worked on a Marathi film. Neeta has previously won the coveted award for her work in Bollywood films Lamhe, Devdas and Jodhaa-Akbar. And now that she has bagged a National Award for a Marathi film, she cherishes the experience of working on the project even more. Ask her what prompted her to take on the film and Neeta says that it was the script. “I heard the script while doing the recee of the film, in a mall in Pune. I didn’t think whether it would fetch me an award or not, at that time, but I knew it would turn out to be a landmark in Marathi films,” says Neeta.
Talking about how confident she was about doing justice to the characters in the film, Neeta says that she was scared. “It was scary for me because I didn’t want to go wrong in styling the character that is a man playing a woman. I wanted to make him look believable,” says Neeta. In fact, she did more than just costume design, she got the lead, Subodh Bhave, to lose weight so that he didn’t look as robust. “A regular nine-yard sari wasn’t enough to wrap around him, so I fused two such saris to make one big one for Subodh. It was an 18-yard sari,” she laughs. What made Neeta the happiest was when she learnt that even though the saris she designed were for a guy, women have reacted positively and are copying the style. “Most of the saris have patched borders with an unusual colour scheme. I’m glad that women liked them too,” she smiles.
