For thirteen years​ Britney Spears lived under a conservatorship, a legal arrangement in which every aspect of her life was controlled by her father. She couldn’t spend her own money, drive her own car, write a cheque, change her setlist, get a manicure, take vitamins for her hair, remove her IUD or drink coffee. Jamie Spears had the power to enter his daughter into new contracts, make medical decisions for her, choose her security guards and monitor all her communications. During the years of the conservatorship, which began when she was 26, the entity known as Britney Spears nevertheless released four albums and more than twenty perfumes. She was a judge and mentor on The X Factor USA, and for four years earned more than $1 million a week from a Las Vegas residency while receiving a personal weekly allowance of $2000. Her earnings supported several family members, her own court-appointed attorney and her father’s team of attorneys and business managers, while her ex-husband received $20,000 a month in child support. She did this while being deemed unable to feed, clothe or shelter herself independently, per the legal definition of a conservatee in the state of California.

In 2007, Britney had experienced a very public breakdown. Tabloids reported daily on her ‘erratic behaviour’: driving dangerously, staying out late, forgetting to wear knickers. One afternoon she drove her SUV to a hair salon in the Valley and shaved her head in front of dozens of paparazzi; a few days later, she attacked a photographer’s car with an umbrella. That same year she finalised her divorce and lost custody of her two children. In January 2008, Britney was arrested at home and placed under a 5150 hold – temporary detainment in a psychiatric hospital – after locking herself in a bathroom with her 15-month-old son at the end of a court-monitored visit. Police cars and ambulances swarmed, tailed by paparazzi hoping to capture the next day’s front page: the world’s biggest pop star being hauled out of her mansion, strapped to a stretcher. Four weeks later, twenty police officers stormed her beach house and placed her under a second 5150. Britney believes that her family led the intervention, assisted by the business manager Lou Taylor, whose company Tri Star went on to receive at least $18 million from the conservatorship. An even larger convoy of paps and police followed the ambulance to hospital. This time she was supervised round the clock while her father petitioned for control of her person and assets. Britney had no choice but to co-operate if she wanted to renew contact with her sons. ‘My freedom in exchange for naps with my children – it was a trade I was willing to make,’ she writes in her memoir, The Woman in Me. That is how, from February 2008 to September 2021, Jamie Spears took over his adult daughter’s life.

The loss of agency must have been bewildering for a young woman used to having the world revolve around her needs, her desires, her schedule. Britney had already spent a decade in the public glare, after being catapulted to celebrity at sixteen when her debut single, ‘Baby One More Time’, went to number one in twenty countries. Living in a Hollywood bubble yet painfully exposed to the world: whose sanity wouldn’t wobble? What we didn’t know was that Britney was also dealing with undiagnosed postnatal depression, and grieving the death of a beloved aunt as well as an aborted pregnancy; on top of this, she was exhausted by years of touring and was mixing her drinks with prescription pills – all while a horde of photographers trailed her around town. The press showed little sympathy, reporting on her meltdown not as a mental health crisis so much as a petulant squandering of looks and talent: as though she’d decided to abandon the American dream and reverted to being white trash.

In the mid-2000s the celebrity gossip machine was hitting peak efficiency, with a clutch of new weekly magazines followed by digital arrivistes such as TMZ, a rolling news website fed by a network of LA tipsters, and bloggers like Perez Hilton, a professional troll who posted leaked nudes and outed gay celebrities. Britney was their biggest trophy, with a face that sold more magazines than any other and, for years, the most searched name on the internet. But she was also a delivery system for pop music like few before her. Her Southern manners and goofy humour made her physical beauty seem just about attainable, and her teenage body was the object of collective desire. I remember seeing her poster on my best friend’s wall – lips slightly parted, a ragged strap sliding off her shoulder – and the two of us agreeing that we were gay for Britney Spears. She was never at home on the static red carpet, feet splayed, smile too wide. Instead her grace emerged through movement, a hip-hop dance vocabulary of popping, locking and rolling. Her early stage outfits were subtly masculine, too: flared trousers, flat shoes and fedoras, famous midriff rippling under a crop top. Flanked by backing dancers, she was always ready to be flipped, hoisted or clipped onto aerial wires – hands-free, of course, wearing the signature ‘Britney mic’.

The perfect pop star, then, though not especially interested in music. When she was paired with au courant collaborators – Southern hip-hop minimalists the Neptunes, the Swedish super-producers Max Martin and Bloodshy & Avant – it was industry logic more than personal preference. But that didn’t matter, because Britney instinctively knew how to inhabit a song. Her voice is singular, a randomised texture generator that can flip between baby doll and seductress in a croak. She has the ability to make nonsensical, lost in translation, even vaguely offensive lyrics sound great: ‘Hit me, baby,’ ‘Oops! I did it again,’ ‘I’m a … sla-ave for you.’ There are stomping school disco hits like ‘(You Drive Me) Crazy’; sexed-up, stripped-back R&B jams (‘Boys’); and sweet yet sombre ballads (‘Everytime’, ‘Sometimes’, ‘Email My Heart’). There’s one dazzling, Bollywood-sampling, pomo show pony: ‘Toxic’, a dance hit so inventive that it helped usher in a critical shift towards ‘poptimism’, a reframing of ‘manufactured’ pop as worthy of serious attention. In one scene from the video, her entire body is covered with glittering diamantés. Another tranche of her most personal songs – mostly written not by her, but for her – can be pieced together to form a metacommentary on her life: ‘Overprotected’, ‘Lucky’, ‘Piece of Me’, ‘Work Bitch’, ‘Stronger’.

By the time of Britney’s breakdown in 2007, she had released five albums, starred in a movie, been the face of Pepsi, snogged Madonna, filled her mantelpiece with awards and broken sales records around the world. She’d also become a tabloid fixture, labelled ‘sick’, ‘out of control’, a ‘time bomb’. The Hollywood fairy tale had turned Southern Gothic. As punishment for her moral failings she was cursed with a thirteen-year sleep in a high tower, a living death. Yet when she finally prevailed, all it took to end the conservatorship was to say the magic words in court. Poof – the spell was broken.

Britney Jean Spears​ was born in McComb, Mississippi in 1981 and raised just over the state border in Kentwood, Louisiana, a dairy farming town in slow decline. Her parents, Jamie and Lynne, fought constantly: she writes that the house was a ‘zoo’. Jamie had been a high-school basketball star and ran a successful gym before drinking sent him wayward and he missed his kids’ birthdays as well as his loan repayments. The summer after Britney signed her record deal, the family filed for bankruptcy. Jamie’s father, June, had been a cruel disciplinarian: every day after basketball practice, Jamie would have to shoot a hundred extra baskets before being allowed inside to eat. June’s wife, Emma Jean, spent time on a psychiatric ward. She never got over the death of her infant son, and shot herself at his grave when Jamie was fourteen.

Lynne, a teacher, held the family together with prayer and potato salad. Compared to her ‘reckless, cold and mean’ father, Britney paints Lynne as passive and avoidant, unwilling or unable to leave her husband or to stand up for her daughter. Lynne’s mother, Lily, was a war bride from London who had followed her husband to rural Louisiana. Her granddaughter adored her accent and her refined manners. As the middle child, Britney was both self-sufficient and eager for attention. She doted on her older brother, Bryan, and her baby sister, Jamie Lynn. Britney’s talent for singing and dancing was apparent from the age of four. Lynne took her to dance classes, gymnastics, singing competitions and TV auditions; when Britney landed a role on The All New Mickey Mouse Club, they moved to Florida. After two series of the show, Britney went back to school in Kentwood, a brief window of normality before her demo found its way to an A&R man at Jive Records. She was sent to Sweden, where Max Martin, who’d had hits with Robyn and the Backstreet Boys, handed her a bizarre chorus: ‘Hit me baby, one more time!’ (The original lyric was the less perplexing ‘Hit me up.’) The night before recording, Britney listened to Soft Cell’s ‘Tainted Love’ and stayed up late in order to sound similarly ‘fried’ on tape. In those pre-fame months she moulded her voice into something quite different from the big-lunged belt of her talent show days: whimpering and coquettish, with a Michael Jackson hiccup. On ‘Baby One More Time’ it was paired with a jarring three-note riff and an instantly famous video shot in a high school, resetting the pop clocks with a controlled explosion of scrunchies, crop tops and love hearts. For a moment in 1999, the whole world sang to her tune.

‘Baby One More Time’ became the biggest-selling song of the year in the UK, and went quintuple platinum in the US. Britney embarked on an exhausting cycle of recording and touring, releasing three albums in three years. Her stardom was portioned out in images: vacuum-packed into a shiny red catsuit; holding a seven-foot-long albino python; twinning in double denim with her boyfriend Justin Timberlake; papped in a T-shirt that read ‘I am the American dream.’ Her coming-of-age was a recurring lyrical theme: ‘I’m not a girl, not yet a woman’; ‘All you people look at me like I’m a little girl’; ‘I don’t wanna be so damn protected.’ Her management encouraged the press to believe – incorrectly – that she was a virgin, chastely waiting to peel off the catsuit in her marital bed. For her first Rolling Stone cover, aged seventeen, David LaChapelle shot her in a bra and hot pants, one arm around a Teletubby doll. Lynne was horrified; Britney asked LaChapelle to direct her next video. In this period she seemed both omnipotent and obedient, a chronic people-pleaser at the centre of her own universe. Her concerts broke new ground with their complex routines (masterminded by the boy wonder choreographer Wade Robson) and cutting-edge techniques, which turned the pop concert into a theatrical spectacle complete with video screens, flying stages, acrobatics, pyrotechnics, artificial snow and waterfalls that soaked her to the skin. She was known as a hard taskmaster, but she herself was screwed tightly into the label machine, fatigued (and injured) by constant touring, recording and press engagements.

In 2000, Britney discovered she was pregnant. Timberlake and her management pressured her to have an abortion in secret. A couple of years later their relationship crumbled – he cheated, so she cheated, and he dumped her by text message. In the video for his single ‘Cry Me a River’, he jabbed at her infidelity by casting his love interest as a blonde villainess creeping around in the shadows. Now the world knew she wasn’t a virgin; she was a hypocrite, and a cheater to boot. Timberlake did her dirty, though he was only 21 – naive enough to be cruel, smart enough to know what would sell. At Britney Inc. there was no compassionate leave. Her parents – who by this time were fully entangled in her business – decided she had to set the record straight and get back on the road. Hustled onto ABC for an interview, Britney cried when Diane Sawyer demanded to know what she’d done to break Justin’s heart.

The interview was a breaking point: ‘I felt something dark come over my body,’ she remembers. She could no longer embody all the contradictions c0ntained in her public persona: sexy but pure, radiant but accessible, mature enough but barely legal. Like so many overexposed starlets before her, she hit the big red button, just to see what would happen: ‘Hello alcohol!’ On the eve of 2004 she flew her friends to Las Vegas. She remembers dancing on tables and running through the casino with no shoes on, but has hazier memories of ending up at the Little White Wedding Chapel, high on ecstasy, and marrying her old high-school friend Jason Alexander. She wore a white baseball cap and a garter pulled over her ripped jeans. Within hours Jamie and Lynne had flown to Las Vegas to force an annulment. Britney complied, but she was bewildered by her parents’ meddling and the ensuing media frenzy. ‘We landed on Mars that day,’ she told MTV two weeks later. ‘Why aren’t they talking about that?’

Was Vegas the fatal twist in the tale, the bite of the cursed apple? Britney remembers it differently: her parents’ reaction made her think she’d ‘accidentally committed a brilliant act’. One woman’s meltdown is another’s tour de force. By September 2004 she was married again. She had met Kevin Federline, a backing dancer, only five months before their wedding. K-Fed was a gift to the tabloids: a pot-growing wannabe rapper who’d abandoned his pregnant girlfriend to shack up with their golden girl. (Lynne inadvertently put it best: ‘I’ve often thought that if the Lord got hold of Kevin, he could do great things with him.’) For Britney, he was a protector, a dependable buffer against her family and the rest of the world. The newlyweds had the bright idea of trying to take control of the narrative with their own behind-the-scenes TV show, one of the first reality series of its kind. Britney and Kevin: Chaotic, which captured the awkward early months of the relationship in wobbly up-nose footage, was panned, but it provided a useful lesson to other fame-seekers on the need to have their ‘reality’ tightly scripted.

A first child, Sean Preston, was born in 2005. Federline released his debut album, Playing with Fire, the following year, seven weeks after the birth of their second child, Jayden James. By then the marriage had fallen apart, with Britney spiralling into anxiety and depression while Federline was away from home. He claims in his memoir that Britney took cocaine at his album release party, prompting him to file for custody of the boys. Set loose by the split and fuelled by Adderall, Britney was lonely and exhausted. She was heard chattering in an English accent. One day, after stopping for coffee, she was surrounded by photographers; she panicked and drove away with Sean in her lap. Not long afterwards, Paris Hilton took her out on the town and she wore a short dress with no underwear, an outfit captured in the ‘upskirt’ photographs that were published the following day. Another night out with Hilton and fellow feral starlet Lindsay Lohan ended in a photo opportunity at the wheel of Hilton’s sports car; the New York Post put them on the front page with the headline ‘Bimbo Summit’.

Among​ the recent glut of books picking over the wreckage of mid-2000s tabloid culture, Jeff Weiss’s fictionalised memoir offers the tightest close-up on Britney’s breakdown. Weiss, now a music journalist, was at the time working as a gossip reporter on the trail of Hollywood stars. He brings us into the diabolical furnace of celebrity news just as digital photography and the launch of the X17 agency had multiplied the numbers of paparazzi. Where Britney’s memoir leaves much unsaid, or perhaps unremembered, Weiss magnifies the hard surfaces of LA in the 2000s: the thin membrane between success and failure, people with ‘no interest in niceties unless you had a Nielsen rating’, VIP ropes and corner booths and $37 salads. He speeds around town with his real-life paparazzo accomplice – who’s British, of course – and arrives at the hair salon in time to see Britney’s locks fall. ‘That night was not a good night for her,’ one paparazzo said in the 2021 documentary Framing Britney Spears, ‘but it was a good night for us, ’cause it was a money shot.’ Eyewitnesses remember her snapping ‘I’m tired of everybody touching me.’

What happens when the heroine chooses to desecrate her beauty? During this period Britney recorded what is her most innovative and influential album. Helmed by the R&B producer Danja as well as Bloodshy & Avant, the sex-hungry, ugly on purpose Blackout is studded with darkside club hits (‘Gimme More’, ‘Radar’); nocturnal, nihilistic and squeezed of organic life. It was recorded in thirty-minute bursts of total focus – any longer and photographers would multiply outside the studio. She laid down ‘Hot as Ice’ in two takes, pushing her voice to new heights; elsewhere she speaks in a fembot monotone, living for pleasure, ego and revenge. ‘Piece of Me’ is a tabloid exposé in reverse, with a snarling Britney rejecting sexist double standards while pointing her finger at the rest of us for going along with them: ‘I’m Miss Bad Media Karma, another day, another drama/Guess I can’t see the harm in working and being a mama/And with a kid on my arm, I’m still an exceptional earner/You want a piece of me?’

Three months after the release of Blackout, the Spears family staged their intervention. Lynne hovered at the edges, but managed to publish her third – and most damaging – memoir about Britney just as the application for conservatorship went to court. Jamie put himself forward to be the conservator. ‘Even though I begged the court to appoint literally anyone else – and I mean, anyone off the street would have been better,’ Britney writes, ‘my father was given the job.’ Under California law there are two main types of conservatorship: probate for cases involving adults unable to care for themselves, and LPS (after the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act) for cases triggered by a mental health crisis. The first is permanent and transfers power over a conservatee’s assets; the second must be renewed annually. Jamie chose to file for probate conservatorship and was granted one, despite never submitting the required ‘capacity declaration’ from a doctor.

Various attorneys, managers and lackeys who had wormed their way into the Spears inner circle had much to gain from keeping the conservatorship running. Britney’s court-appointed lawyer, Samuel Ingham, failed to inform her that she had the right to hire someone else, and for nearly thirteen years invoiced as much as $10,000 a week for his services. Concentric circles of lawsuits were ultimately billed to Britney, including a restraining order her sons took out against Jamie in 2019 following a violent outburst. Anyone she dated had to undergo a background check, sign an NDA and take a blood test. Parental controls were installed on her phone. Sometimes she’d fight back, smuggling in burner phones to make calls to Ingham, but to little effect.

What was going on in Britney’s head at the time? In the mid-2000s she offered sporadic musings on her blog (‘Recently, I was sent to a very humbling place called rehab’), but the updates petered out as the crisis deepened. While under the conservatorship she posted bizarre videos – usually of her dancing in skimpy clothes, chokers and bad hats – which diehard fans scoured for clues about her mental wellbeing. Among the emojiologists were the hosts of the podcast Britney’s Gram, who by 2019 were in the van of the #FreeBritney movement, bringing renewed public attention to the conservatorship. The announcement of a memoir, bought by Simon & Schuster in 2022 for a reported $15 million, promised more than just her side of the story: poetic justice would be done.

It’s a lot to ask of fewer than three hundred pages of generously spaced text. Some passages in The Woman in Me are revealing: the everyday horrors of the conservatorship, the accounts of Jamie’s power trip and Lynne’s frustrating passivity, the dreadful memory of the home abortion and her primal fear of losing her ‘babies’. But the sticky bits are short on detail. Britney bounds through both scandal and success in a gum-snapping, girls-night-out vernacular of ‘shitfaced’ weekends and listen-up-ladies real talk: ‘Fame? That world isn’t real, my friends. It’s. Not. Real.’ She admits that at her worst she was ‘hell on wheels’. But there’s no mention of the hit-and-run incident that lost her custody of her sons, or of the time she turned up to court in her wedding dress, or of the lawsuit from a former security guard who claimed she’d hit Sean with a belt. (Federline’s memoir contains still more alarming claims, including that she punched Sean in the face and fed shellfish to Jayden despite knowing he was allergic.)

There’s also no mention by name of Sam Lutfi, an LA grifter who snaked his way into Britney’s life while she was partly estranged from her parents and dating the paparazzo Adnan Ghalib. According to Lynne, Lutfi threw away Britney’s mobile chargers, disabled her cars, fed her uppers and downers, and isolated her from friends and family. (A restraining order against him stipulated that he could not refer to the Spears family as a ‘clan of hillbilly criminals’.) The Woman in Me functions less as a warts-and-all memoir than as a court deposition, another chapter of the he-said-she-said that has defined Spears’s life.

The​ early 2000s have acquired a reputation as an era of surprising cruelty and blatant misogyny. Celebrity women were under particular scrutiny, their cellulite and pregnant bodies targeted by gossip rags’ ‘circles of shame’. Hollywood starlets were getting arrested, their mugshots leaked to the press; in Britain, singers like Kerry Katona and Amy Winehouse took drugs, fought their boyfriends and sold magazines by the hundred thousand. Reckoning with this period in her book Girl on Girl, the journalist Sophie Gilbert argues that the insinuation of pornography into the mainstream – trickling down through high fashion, pop music and reality TV – was decisive in creating a culture of apparent sexual freedom that was nonetheless monitored and punished by pearl-clutching, slut-shaming media.* She points to the faux-ironic objectification of Terry Richardson’s photography, lad mags’ rankings of ‘high street honeys’, and the obsession with virginity in so many teen movies of the era. Britney’s treatment, in Gilbert’s view, exposed the lie of ‘choice feminism’: patriarchy is still the water we all swim in, so young women can’t present themselves as sexy, wild and free, however much they’re egged on to do so, without becoming vulnerable to attack. It was certainly a strange moment to be not a girl, not yet a woman. Britney’s career began with the plausible deniability of her schoolgirl sex appeal and stalled with the refusal of her right to make adult choices: no Vegas weddings, no drugged-up partying, no sex before marriage, no making yourself ugly on purpose. ‘At what point,’ she asks, ‘did I promise to stay seventeen for the rest of my life?’

In a recent essay comparing Britney with one of her contemporaries, the R&B singer Aaliyah, the critic Philippa Snow notes the damaging effects of the two teen stars’ blocked transitions to womanhood. Sexualised as a child, infantilised as an adult, Britney tried to navigate her status as a sex symbol by pretending in interviews that she wasn’t one. The celebrity woman is ‘routinely subjected to the hollowing out of her interior in favour of the insertion of desire’, Snow writes, which makes her perhaps ‘the most female of us all’. The irony is that femininity is a costume Britney always wore awkwardly. She was a basketball player, not a cheerleader; a self-professed tomboy; goofy rather than graceful. Her sex appeal was cribbed from Janet Jackson and Madonna, but she copied their homework without doing the sums. She doesn’t seem sufficiently cold-blooded for showbusiness – by her own account, she has ‘always been almost disturbingly empathic’. After shooting the movie Crossroads, she found herself unable to snap out of character, and later spent months hiding out in her vast Manhattan apartment, too anxious to socialise. ‘I never knew how to play the game,’ she claims – but others around her did, like Hilton, who hid all her trauma inside the diamond-hard shell of a ditzy bimbo. Britney’s insides were so exposed, her reactions so instinctive, that Hilton nicknamed her ‘the animal’. But once her family had taken control, she was left a pliant zombie. In her memoir, Britney describes the way her Vegas residency kept her in stasis, the choreography never changing. ‘If I play along, surely they’ll see how good I am and they will let me go,’ she reasoned at first. Eventually, ‘I felt like I was dead.’ More than once her father was overheard saying, ‘I’m Britney Spears now.’

A lot changed during those thirteen years. The #MeToo movement sent tremors through Hollywood and beyond, social media turned into a political battleground, celebrities built PR fortresses out of scripted TV shows and social media, and mental illness became less taboo. Pop fans mobilised ‘stan’ armies to defend their favourite musicians, sometimes harassing critics who’d written negative reviews, but in Britney’s case leading the charge to have the conservatorship terminated. Her supporters began turning up to court hearings wearing #FreeBritney T-shirts. Several investigations and TV documentaries appeared in 2021. Behind the curtain, Britney was finding her own ways to rebel. On stage she flattened her energy and stopped tossing her hair, ‘my own version of a factory slowdown’. When her Instagram posts changed in tone, fans sensed that something was up and speculated that Britney’s team had taken control of her social media. Supposedly, after she refused to try out a new dance move, her family held a meeting with the directors of the Vegas show. The next day her doctor accused her of taking drugs; she was sent to rehab again and put on lithium, the same drug her grandmother had been given decades before. Forced to sit in a chair and do therapy for months, Britney felt her ‘concept of time morph’.

The end of the conservatorship was as surprising as its beginning. In 2021, Britney asked to address a court hearing and demanded that it be open to the public. Fans gathered around an audio feed outside the court. She spoke for 23 minutes, so fast that the judge repeatedly asked her to slow down for the court reporter. ‘I’m making a living for so many people … and I’m told I’m not good enough. But I’m great at what I do,’ Britney seethed over video call. ‘I would like to sue my family.’ She requested that the conservatorship be ended without her having to undergo further mental evaluation. For that to happen, the judge explained, she would need to submit a petition – which was news to Britney, but presumably not to her long-standing attorney. Jamie stepped down as conservator that September, and by November Britney was free. (Only in 2024 did she finally disentangle herself financially, agreeing to settle out of court after Jamie demanded that his legal fees be paid by her estate.) The same year a ‘#FreeBritney bill’ was signed into law in California, limiting the use of conservatorships.

Reinstalled in her mansion, free to drink, dance, drive or pop over to Kim Kardashian’s house for a sleepover, Britney continues to post some of the oddest videos on Instagram. With tangled hair and gappy teeth, she slips into an English accent or improvises dance routines with kitchen knives. Online commenters fall into two camps, either celebrating her display of individual agency or arguing that she ‘needs help’ and was better off under the conservatorship. How mad is someone allowed to be without legal intervention? Equally, how should we deal with mentally unstable people who happen to be rich and famous? Britney experienced her fame as an isolating illness, a conviction that she was being manipulated, spied on and lied to. Who’d want to tell her any different? She spiralled into dangerously erratic territory, but she was never offered the time and space to get better, or even to admit that she had a problem. ‘I was afraid somebody would think I was crazy,’ she writes, perhaps the saddest line in the book.

One solution to a factory slowdown is to move production offshore. In January 2020, an ‘immersive fan experience’ opened in a Barbie-pink former Kmart in Los Angeles. The Zone was reportedly ‘approved by Britney’ – meaning, legally speaking, her father – and was the work of two ‘superfans’. Visitors paid as much as $70 a ticket to walk through a series of photo opportunities themed around the hits: a ‘Baby One More Time’ high school, a ‘Slave 4 U’ jungle complete with python soft toy, a Circus ball pit, a Blackout church. On the ‘Piece of Me’ red carpet, a wall of paparazzi cameras flashed, with voices shouting from all directions: ‘Look over here, Britney!’ In the next room, your photo would appear on the cover of a mocked-up magazine. Logically, the final room should have been a hair salon with bald caps to try on, perhaps a stretcher to be strapped onto; instead, visitors exited through the giftshop, where they could pick up a T-shirt emblazoned with the words WORK BITCH. An entire life rendered into a series of wearable moments, frozen images to climb inside and wear like a costume: I’m Britney Spears now.