This season, Bloomingdale's has been celebrating the 75th Anniversary of DC Comics with a special selection of exclusive merchandise from brands like Converse, Psycho Bunny and Jack Spade among others. We were kind of hoping that they would take the opportunity to do an Epic Superhero Holiday Extravaganza for their windows, but instead have only placed core characters Batman & Robin in a vaguely questionable situation that would appear to confirm the long held suspicions of some that the two are more than just a crime-fighting duo.
The Lexington Avenue window is entitled "Dynamic Duos", and features the team alongside other famous couples that otherwise have nothing else whatsoever to do with each other, including Antony and Cleopatra, Barack and Michelle Obama, and Santa and Mrs. Claus. Is the window suggesting that Batman & Robin are indeed romantically linked like the others? Given the general ineptness of this window, we tend to think not. It is probably just an unintended effect of trying to wedge a store promotion into a not terribly well-conceived holiday display. The mannequins are so ill-matched that they don't even appear to come from the same workshop. In fact it's basically impossible for any of these pairs to exist at the same time in any single universe, especially since some of them are imaginary.
There's lots of things to love about Bloomingdale's, but their Holiday windows, in general, have never garnered the kind of acclaim and attention that Barneys, Bergdorf's and Saks have (Though this particular window is basically a mess, we want to mention that the other windows have been executed with somewhat more finesse). Now they have unwittingly referenced decades of very unofficial fan generated slash-fiction that portrays the Batman and Robin (in this case, Bruce Wayne and his ward, Tim Drake, judging from their costumes) as lovers which, in many cases, has incurred vigilant legal action from DC. The publisher has always firmly maintained that the two are just friends and coworkers, despite Batman's lack of a steady romantic interest like Superman and Lois Lane, for example (There's that tortured relationship with Catwoman, but we digress...). While there are a few gay characters in the vast DC Universe, and many heroes and villains have been re-conceived over the decades. Batman and Robin have never officially been adapted like that, and probably won't be anytime soon.
Since DC is in the middle of a promotion with Bloomingdale's, we aren't quite sure how they will respond, if at all. Perhaps Batman & Robin are just serving as security for Santa and his celebrity visitors —because why would they have anything else to do?