Lamp! in Batman Returns (1992), production design by Bo Welch.
Although Anton Furst’s Gotham in the preceding film were redesigned for the sequel by Welch, Bruce Wayne’s world remained the same in that the atmosphere is still a combination of architectural styles in order that Gotham is portrayed as a bleak and ugly metropolis. “As if hell erupted through the pavement and kept on going,” according to Furst.
But, whereas the first film is described to have taken place in the East Side of New York, the sequel takes place in the West Side. The formality and seriousness of the Gotham inspired by Art Deco, German Expressionism and the Gothic, are traded in for the ‘American and ironic’, further exaggerating the city, its dark and crime-riddled history drowned by corporate imagery informed by Nazi era Germany and Post-WWI Precisionism, and displaying the wealth inequality between the characters in the old money Victorian manor of Bruce Wayne, the looming high-rise building of Max Shreck, the humble apartment of Selina Kyle, and the spacious albeit toxic sewers of Oswald Cobblepot.
1980s America in particular had been influenced by the fashion and architecture of World War II; I don’t know when or where the seed was planted in a general sense, but as far as fashion is concerned I have traced it as far back as Yves Saint Laurent’s 1971 “Scandal Collection”. Inspired by German occupied Paris—where the collection also debuted—Saint Laurent was criticized for allegedly romanticizing a time of fear and scarcity that many Parisians who remembered it preferred to leave in the past, such as Christian Dior, who marked a new era in America and Europe with his New Look in retaliation in the 1950s. The makeup was inspired by cabaret singers and B&W film stars, the hair was short and sensible if not curly and brushed out, Greco-inspired prints call back to Adolf Hitler’s use of Greek Antiquity in his propaganda, there are various iterations of a two-piece suit in skirt or pants for the working woman or the idle aristocrat, and cocktail and dinner dresses that play with the empire silhouette (another call back to Greek Antiquity), there are bows and embellishments of gaudy sizes that mimic the numerous ways accessories were often improvised to bring a pop of life and color in an otherwise smart ensemble, fur coats and stoles to take an outfit from day to night in an instant.
Saint Laurent’s sensibilities and the ten or so years it took to cement its influence in popular fashion can be seen in Batman Returns. For though released in 1992 (like the erotic thriller classic Basic Instinct) the styles we associate with the 1980s continued in the early 1990s, not yet shedding the padded shoulders and tipping into the Modern and Minimalistic sexiness associated with designers like Tom Ford, Martin Margiela, Alexander McQueen, Yohji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo, Ann Demeulemeester, Jil Sander, Helmut Lang, Miuccia Prada and so on, until ‘94 or ‘95.
In the design of this lamp alone you can see the past in its resemblance to the industrial designs of the Bauhaus movement in the 1920s-30s, which were made with principles in mass production and function; its present as a mass-produced item picked up from IKEA, a furniture retailer founded in the 1940s; and its future, for steel, chrome and other sleek and reflective materials like tiles, glass and acrylic from the 1990s to the 2000s were carved and molded into geometric shapes in neo noir and sci-fi films, fashion editorials and music videos. It’s perfect for the scene it’s featured in: a meeting room in Max Shreck’s company building.
I managed to find lamps with a similar design, but one that stood out to me the most was designed by Olle Lundberg for IKEA in the 1980s, labeled as the Dakapo Mushroom Light, shown below.
— Citations and References —
“The Caped Crusader” by Richard Corliss, TIME MAGAZINE, 19 Jun 1989.
"A Knight At The Zoo" by Mark Cotta Vaz, CINEFEX, Aug 1992.
“Batman Returns: Director Tim Burton wins the creative control to do The Dark Knight justice.” by Taylor L. White, CINEFANTASTIQUE, Aug 1992.
“Yves Saint Laurent: The Scandal Collection, 1971” by Alexandre Samson, Olivier Saillard, and Yves Saint Laurent, 25 Mar 2015.
“Vogue on Christian Dior” by Charlotte Sinclair, 10 Feb 2015.
