Chikankari is white-on-white embroidery worked on fine cotton, and it has been made in and around Lucknow for several centuries. It looks simple from a distance. It is not.
The design is first block-printed onto the cloth in a washable blue. The embroiderer follows those lines by hand, and the print is washed out at the end — which means every mark you can see is thread, and every mark you cannot see was removed.
There are more than thirty named stitches in the tradition. A single piece will typically use six or seven of them: bakhiya worked from the reverse so the shadow shows through the cloth, phanda for the small knotted dots, jaali where the threads are teased apart to make a net without cutting a single one.
That last one is worth dwelling on. Jaali is not cut lace. The weave is pushed aside with the needle and held open with stitches, so the hole is made without weakening the cloth. It is slow, and it is the reason a chikankari kurta drapes the way it does.
A simple kurta is perhaps forty hours of work. An elaborate one is considerably more. When you see hand chikankari sold for less than the cost of that time, somebody in the chain is not being paid.