I actually don't like the way the oval-less bat is drawn now, where it's such a slick design. I'd rather think that Alfred just orders in a bunch of grey sweatshirts in bulk and then uses a Sharpie to scrawl a black bat on each of them by hand.
Call me quirky, but I liked how in the first twenty-five years of Batman, the bat was done in a slap-dash manner. Since it was the job of the inker (not the penciller) to put that on Batman's chest--while they each had their own version (which is how you can identify different Batman inkers)--they weren't consistent from panel to panel and it wasn't a slick looking design.
Even when the oval was put around the bat--it wasn't always consistent. Although Joe Geilla was the main inker, the emblem was different if it was for Sheldon Moldoff or Carmine Infantino (and still different when Sheldon Moldoff was doing the comic strip on his own). It only seemed to become a formal design around 1968.
And in 1989, the trademark oval bat was everywhere for months and was used as the image to advertise the movie. Yet when Michael Keaton appeared as Batman in the movie, he had a different design. How'd that happen? How is it they pushed the symbol to such a degree, that we were all wearing it on our T-shirts, but they somehow didn't use that one when they made the movie?