What does Bruce Wayne wear for a night on the town? We all know Batman has his batsuit, but when the billionaire playboy steps out for a political fundraiser or fancy museum gala, he can’t just throw on a T-shirt and jeans. He needs a nice suit.
For the 1995 movie Batman Forever, the decision of how to dress Bruce Wayne came down to costume designer Ingrid Ferrin, a longtime collaborator of director Joel Schumacher.
“I was invited to design the real world of Gotham—Bruce Wayne, Chase Meridian [the film’s female lead, played by Nicole Kidman], and so on,” Ferrin tells Cool Material.
So what does Bruce Wayne wear? In this case, the answer was Hugo Boss.
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Clothes Make the Man
“It was a big movie, and the studio had a whole department for product placement,” Ferrin says. “They introduced me to the Hugo Boss and Armani people. Val Kilmer wasn’t really into fashion, but he was up for it.”
“It was product placement, so we didn’t have to pay for it,” she continues. “It was custom-made. I got to choose the fabrics. The main suit was Hugo Boss, along with a beautiful overcoat. I believe Batman & Robin used Armani, but for Batman Forever, it was Hugo Boss.”
Ferrin’s costume-designing days are long behind her, but as the woman who put Bruce Wayne in designer suits 30 years ago, one can’t help but wonder how she’d dress up the billionaire playboy today. Her answer is practical: It depends on who’s willing to pay for the product placement. But when pressed, Ferrin can’t help but rattle off a few modern powerhouses of men’s fashion.
“I’d propose Saint Laurent, Giorgio Armani—Armani is still relevant in men’s fashion—also Yves Saint Laurent, Dior, and other major brands with a strong presence,” she says.
Hopefully, whoever’s in charge at Warner Bros. Discovery is taking notes.
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Bat-Nipples Begin
While Bruce Wayne may have stunned in designer suits, Batman Forever’s most memorable article of clothing is undeniably the batsuit — and one specific detail in particular.
It’s impossible to talk about Batman Forever without touching on those infamous latex nipples. However, Ferrin actually had very little to do with the Batsuit design, which was instead the work of Bob Ringwood (her co-design lead, who had worked on the previous Tim Burton movies).
“I wanted it to be sleek and sexy like a panther, and it’s known as the Panther Suit,” Ringwood said in a 2016 interview with The Independent. “I put nipples on it not to be provocative, but because if you’re sculpting a body it would seem bizarre not to have nipples.”
He hired a sculptor named José Fernandez to figure out the design, which drew inspiration from ancient warfare. Speaking to Mel Magazine in 2022, Fernandez revealed that the Bat-nipples were inspired by Roman soldiers.
“It wasn’t fetish to me, it was more informed by Roman armor — like Centurions,” he said. “In the comic books, the characters always looked like they were naked with spray paint on them—it was all about anatomy, and I like to push anatomy. I don’t know exactly where my head was at back in the day, but that’s what I remember. And so, I added the nipples. I had no idea there was going to end up being all this buzz about it.”
Reflecting on the infamous supersuit, Ferrin recalls being impressed by the massive operation required to make Batman’s latex getup in the pre-CGI era.
“Back then, the rubber suits were like a cake recipe. They had to be baked and temperature-controlled,” Ferrin says. “They’d make 60, but only about 10 were usable—free of air bubbles. It was much more complex back then.”
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A Lighter Tone
After back-to-back Tim Burton movies, the studio’s demands of its new Batman director were simple: keep it light.
“I got the sense that there was absolutely no desire to allow me to do anything darker than what I did,” Schumacher told Forbes in 2015.
Where Burton’s movies were dark, gothic, and sometimes scary, Batman Forever was colorful and wacky. Schumacher arguably took this aesthetic too far in his follow-up film Batman and Robin, which nearly put the franchise on ice, but Forever manages to strike the perfect tone.
“They wanted it to feel more like a comic book: lighter, brighter,” Ferrin says. “They wanted to sell toys, hamburgers, Taco Bell, McDonald’s. There were a lot of product placement connections.”
In the decades that followed, Hollywood has seemed determined to make Batman as edgy and gritty as possible. In hindsight, Schumacher’s movies were the last time that Batman got to be weird—at least on the silver screen.
