British designer Lee Broom has received a lot of milestone calls over his career. Beginning his creative tenure in the fashion world by interning for Vivienne Westwood, he’s spent the last 20 years crafting award-winning light pieces and luxury furniture with his eponymous design brand, exhibiting from Milan Design Week to Mexico City. In 2020, he collaborated with Beyoncé, providing a minimalist yet striking gold Hanging Hoop Chair that sat central to her 2020 visual album Black Is King. Yet for Broom, who first endeared himself to Westwood by creating a fantasy costume for Madonna in a junior design competition and has now contributed his own bespoke piece to the pop superstar’s newly-released Confessions II film, there are few calls like one from the Queen of Pop.
'The 15-year-old me is doing cartwheels in their bedroom, for sure. I was thrilled. Growing up, I really appreciated her artistry not just as a musician but as a visionary, a spokesperson for LGBTQ+ rights, and an all-round blueprint for the pop industry,' he tells Wallpaper*. 'I grew up in theatre and then went into fashion, so performance, art, fashion, design all infiltrated my work. An artist like Madonna who has a sort of performative storytelling, pushing-the-envelope quality to their work – I was completely sucked in.'
Broom was contacted by Madonna’s production design team back in February, inquiring about potential products that could be utilised for 'a top secret project with a very famous artist'. Later, he was sent a storyboard showing the expansive concept for the film, which takes viewers through the pop icon’s forthcoming Confessions II album via a series of interlinked rooms and vignettes. In the section dedicated to new song One Step Away, Madonna is featured in a slick, hard-edged kitchen. For the scene, it’s a bespoke adaptation of Broom’s 2015 Crystal Tube Light that illuminates the image.
Lee Broom's Crystal Tube Light
The original Crystal Tube Light is a cut-glass, handcrafted piece that was previously featured as part of the designer’s 2015 Milan show, The Department Store. 'I designed a number of crystal light fixtures with this idea of creating industrial lighting products and combining them with the sort of decorative cut glass that you would get in decanters or whiskey glasses,' he explains. 'Laurie Walters, the art director for the Confessions II film, really loved the piece because the setting that it's in is a very contemporary apartment with art deco references, and this light fixture is very much that. They wanted something elongated that could hang above the kitchen island unit and create this sort of linear vision in shots in the background.'
Lee Broom's Crystal Tube Light
In order to fit the brief for the video, which demanded a longer, two metre version of the piece, Broom set about designing prototypes from his East London studio. 'My product development team looked to find ways that we could increase the overall scale of the piece. We kept the tube formation diameter exactly the same, but we connected elements together and changed some of the crystal cuts so that it worked as a pattern on a much larger scale,' he explains. Bringing in hand-cut glass from the Czech Republic and assembling the object in Barking, the featured scene was then shot on location elsewhere in London. 'I quite fancied delivering the items myself, disguised as a delivery guy. But no, that wasn't the case,' Broom jokes. 'Everything was very secretive and locked down.'
For Broom, who has always looked to mediums beyond design, working with a global superstar such as Madonna offers a chance to bring his work into the frame of popular culture. 'When you talk specifically about the design industry, it's a very loose, open word, but it's actually very specific: it’s furniture, product, industrial design, perhaps interior design. It's restricted in a way, and I feel like the general public who aren't in that industry sometimes find it difficult to connect with what we're producing,' he suggests. 'So when you have an opportunity to insert your work and your vision into something as globally iconic and as popular as a Madonna music video or film, it opens it up into a different ether that people aren't used to.
Lee Broom, Beacon, for London Design Festival
He continues: 'My own work as a lighting designer and a product designer is in a commercial space, but I love the avant-garde and I feel like if you can allow those two points to meet – the commercial and the art – then that’s a really interesting tipping point that’s sometimes difficult to get right. But when you look at an artist like Madonna, that idea epitomises some of their work.'
Later in the year, Broom will begin work on his 20th-anniversary show in Milan, with more collaborative projects also in the pipeline following his recent projects with Lladró and Fendi Casa. For the designer’s childhood self, however, there’s likely to be few things as memorable as his Confessions II contribution.
'For my 16th birthday, I remember getting my mother to buy me Madonna’s SEX book,” he chuckles. 'She got her friend Audrey, who worked next door to Waterstones, to queue up in the morning and buy it, neither of them knowing exactly what the content of the book was. It was literally the best birthday present I've ever had, even though she wasn't so happy when she actually got to see what was inside…' From superfan to collaborator, it’s yet another milestone to tick off in Broom’s illustrious trajectory.