Why Britney Spears Refused to Thrash Her Hair

"Everyone who was making money off me wanted me to move my hair, and I knew it — and so I did everything but that," she writes in her memoir.

Do you remember the Britney’s Gram podcast? Comedians Tess Barker and Barbara Gray used Britney Spears’s Instagram activity as a jumping off point for discussing her on a weekly basis starting in 2017. They analyzed her unusually lo-fi (for a celebrity) posts, including her emoji usage, personal photos, and favored memes, in effort to determine what was really going behind the scenes of the conservatorship she had been living under since 2008.

In Spears’s riveting new memoir The Woman in Me, which I tore through in several hours after it came out Tuesday, we learn that fans might not have needed to parse her emojis like tea leaves for clues. All we really had to do was look at her.

Spears writes that under her conservatorship, her dad made her to do tours she didn’t want to do. If she resisted, she was sent to rehab programs she found torturous that isolated her from her kids, forced her to take medication, and robbed her of all personal agency. Her dad was among the people reaping huge financial rewards from Britney Spears Inc. while she received a $2,000 monthly allowance. Meanwhile, she couldn’t afford to treat her dancers to a $1,000 dinner, and wasn’t allowed to eat much more than chicken and canned vegetables for years because her dad thought she needed to lose weight. Spears felt like she couldn’t fight back, but, she explains:

As performers, we girls have our hair. That’s the real thing guys want to see. They love to see the long hair move. They want you to thrash it. If your hair’s moving, they can believe you’re having a good time.

In the most demoralizing moments of my Las Vegas residency, I wore tight wigs, and I’d dance in a way where I wouldn’t move a hair on my head. Everyone who was making money off me wanted me to move my hair, and I knew it — and so I did everything but that.

She adds that she “did the moves” and “sang the notes” but “didn’t put the fire behind it that I had in the past.” While reading the book, I kept pausing to look up certain songs and YouTube videos to remind myself what she was talking about, and to look at her through the lens of knowing what she was feeling. And you can see in those Vegas shows that she does appear, to use her word, to be “sleepwalking” through it compared to her earlier shows. We just didn’t know at the time that this was intentional.

Fashion analysis of celebrities, heads of state, the royals, and more is often dismissed as fluffy or reading too much into something that is merely surface and arbitrary. Throughout the book, Spears reminds us that personal image in the public realm is not arbitrary. Image is a form of communication. Image is power. Image matters, which is why public figures craft it with such intent. And while Spears masterfully used her image to capture the spotlight, she unfortunately ended up unable to figure out how to control it to the extent that she could.

I wondered going into the book if Spears would discuss any fashion moments — say, her 2001 Vogue cover or how she thought about choosing clothes for performances or red carpets. I was struck by how noticeably removed from the fashion industry she seemed. Unlike, say, Madonna and Jean Paul Gaultier or J. Lo and Versace, she wasn’t synonymous with any one designer. Her style signature was a bare midriff, which is rather conventional as far as fashion goes. Her most memorable outfits include not a meat dress or cone bra, but the coordinating denim formalwear she and then-boyfriend Justin Timberlake wore to the 2001 American Music Awards. She had suggested it as a joke, but then her stylist went through with procuring the outfits, and she and Justin just went for it because it was fun. “I get that it was tacky,” she reflects. She writes about attending Donatella Versace’s fashion show in Milan in 2002 to distract herself from the pain of her breakup with Timberlake as though it was a truly special experience to her, as opposed to something she did as a matter of routine self-promotion.

But Spears was always the sort of pop star who dressed in things that mostly didn’t confuse the masses who are uninterested in what walks down European runways. Many pop stars succeed with an opposite approach. Beyoncé fans made a sport of checking her Instagram feed the day after her Renaissance shows to see which avant-garde looks she had worn the previous night. Madonna, Lady Gaga, Harry Styles, and countless others have made cutting-edge fashion parts of their brands as musicians. This is not to say one strategy is better than the other. But Spears was always a bit more like Taylor Swift in that her clothes were more relatable than they were a riddle to solve. Based on her book, I’d speculate that that was in part due to naiveté. She could have worn probably almost anything in the world at many points in her career, yet I wonder if she even realize that those options were available to her.

Ironically, she seems to have had more agency over her look when she was just starting out as a teenager. She recalls how her record label wanted her to play a “futuristic astronaut” in the “…Baby One More Time” music video and presented mock-ups to her where she looked “like a Power Ranger.” She writes, “That image didn’t resonate with me, and I had a feeling my audience wouldn’t relate to it, either. I told the executives at the label that I thought people would want to see my friends and me sitting at school, bored, and then as soon as the bell rang, boom — we’d start dancing.”

Obviously, Spears was right. Yet her crop tops in the video kicked off her trajectory as a cultural flash point, a controversial teen sex symbol, which was not how Spears saw herself. After she performed “Oops I Did It Again” at the 2000 VMAs wearing a nude glittery bikini top and matching pants at age 18, she recalls MTV making her watch “strangers in Times Square” opine on her performance. Many criticized what she was wearing for being “too sexy.” “I was never quite sure what all these critics thought I was supposed to be doing — a Bob Dylan impression?” she writes. “I liked looking cute. Why did everyone treat me, even when I was a teenager, like I was dangerous?”

In February 2007, Spears shaved her head. She was stricken with grief after losing her Aunt Sandra to ovarian cancer. Additionally, she was locked in a custody battle with ex Kevin Federline, who was keeping her two young sons from her. Desperate to see them, she went to his house only to be hounded by the paparazzi, as she always was during this period. Denied access, she went into a hair salon and shaved her head, or, as she saw it, “I gave them [the paparazzi] some material.” She writes, “Everyone thought it was hilarious. Look how crazy she is! …But nobody seemed to understand that I was simply out of my mind with grief. My children had been taken from me.” She continues:

My long hair was a big part of what people liked — I knew that. I knew a lot of guys thought long hair was hot.

Shaving my head was a way of saying to the world: Fuck you. You want me to be pretty for you? Fuck you. You want me to be good for you? Fuck you. You want me to be your dream girl? Fuck you.

Looking back on it, Spears writes that unlike Kevin and Justin, “I never knew how to play the game. I didn’t know how to present myself on any level. I was a bad dresser — hell, I’m still a bad dresser, and I’ll admit that.” She adds, “I can see now that you have to be smart enough, vicious enough, deliberate enough to play the game, and I did not know the game. I was truly innocent — just clueless… I wasn’t manipulative. I was just stupid.”

I’m not sure if she would see it this way, but the scrutiny Spears was under for so long and for such ugly reasons was almost reclaimed by her fans, many of them millennials who were teens and tweens in the Y2K era. As we got older we realized, through our collective hobby of zealously analyzing pop culture and using the internet as the forum to do so, that maybe there was more to Spears’s life. Something seemed off about her Instagram feed, and indeed, as we now know in heartbreaking detail, something was deeply off in her life.

Revisiting how barbaric the media was to this generation of young women celebrities is astonishing. It’s hard not to feel guilty as a fan who followed her during this terrible time in her life through the sexist narrative the press made available to us. One moment I looked up after reading the book was Spears’s 2019 Vegas tour announcement. She describes coming up onto a stage via a hydraulic lift — and then walking down the stage stairs and a red carpet before getting into her car without announcing the tour, which she had told her team repeatedly she didn’t want to do. The Canadian Entertainment Tonight take on it was this:

That Spears’s announcement was “underwhelming.” If we had been able to see her without the commentary, maybe more of us would have spotted not just cries for help, but also the heartbreaking reality that she didn’t have the right group of advisors to help her manage her mega-fame long before she ended up under her father’s ugly control.

This is not to say that Spears had nothing to do with her freedom; she made a 9-1-1 call to report her father for conservatorship abuse, she sought out a new attorney, and she made a heartbreaking public statement in court that finally revealed the truth about her life, which required her utmost bravery. She took back her freedom, and she explains that being aware of the Free Britney movement helped propel her to do it: “Everyone who spoke out for me helped me survive that hard year, and the work they did helped me win my freedom.”

Her fans knew all this time that appearances matter. And Spears’s book confirms that, in fact, they do.

Get The Woman in Me here. I recommend it!