25 years later, Britney Spears’ 2001 VMAs performance still mesmerizes

By Bianca Betancourt

EDITOR’S NOTE:  Delving into the archives of pop culture history, “Remember When?” is a CNN Style series offering a nostalgic look at the celebrity outfits that defined their eras.

Britney Spears was ready to drop a new single. But how? It was 2001, and Spears was the biggest pop star in the world, with her 10-time-platinum sophomore album, “Oops! I Did It Again” behind her. The public would be expecting something suitably huge.

They got something even bigger than that. Spears decided to deliver the new song, “I’m a Slave 4 U,” live on stage at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera house, during the annual MTV Video Music Awards.

There would be no concert previews or early radio release or teaser clips to prepare the way. The world had to sit down, tune in, and see what might unfold.

What came next set a standard that was genuinely, historically impossible to follow — a risk-taking spectacle that could only have happened at the turn of this century, in those last years before mass media fragmented into millions of personal screens fed by millions of personal cameras, before constant performing and constant exposure took their painful, visible toll on Spears herself.

A 19-year-old Spears stepped casually out of a gilded metal cage, where a white tiger sat behind her. She wore a moss green bra-like top, aquamarine disco shorts, and bedazzled nude-hued boots. Around her was a sea of dancers in animalistic garb — zebra-striped body paint, dual-toned neon wigs — as a pulsating beat produced by The Neptunes blared through the venue and television screens nationwide.

And there was the snake — a 7-foot long, 20-pound albino Burmese python named “Banana” that the star seductively draped across her shoulders for the last portion of the performance.

That image of Spears in jaw-dropping form, wielding a magnetic stare, and commanding not just the stage but the entire world watching at home defined the singer’s peak as a performer. It also stands in stark contrast with the life Spears now lives today. Since being released from a years-long conservatorship where her personal and professional life was controlled by her now estranged father Jamie Spears, the singer has expressed countless times — via social media and her published memoir — that she has no desire to perform ever again.

“The reason this performance has such a legacy is because there’s never been an artist as famous as Britney since Britney,” said Amber Horsburgh, a writer and culture critic. “The technology at the time, the appointment viewing aspect, the importance of MTV, and the Britney Spears MTV collision of it all — it had such a chokehold on the culture at the time.”

Stepping into her own

The jungle-goddess costume was the work of designers Kurt Swanson and Bart Mueller.

“Because we had already done so much together, there was a huge level of trust and how specific looks came together was kind of kinetic,” Mueller wrote in an email. “The lyrics inspired the choreography, which fueled the concepts, and then there was Britney’s performance and energy. It all shaped our design directions. Everything was custom right down to the nude mesh, lucite wedge heel boots that we had hand-sewn crystal anklets to, including a shining sequined serpent wrapping around one leg to punch up the Eve reference.”

Showing skin was a key part of the overall look, but there were also a number of blink-and-you’d-miss it details that brought the ensemble together together. Every piece — the pleated wrap top, the shorts adorned with trailing shards of silk chiffon — was hand-dyed or painted and then covered in Swarovski crystals. “We were crystal- obsessed back then,” said Swanson. “We even had Swarovski tattoo body jewelry applied to her skin.”

What the designers hadn’t considered in putting the outfit together was that a live tiger would be joining the singer on stage.

The rehearsals in the leadup to the show had been human-only, Swanson said. “The day of the VMAs at the tech rehearsal was the first time any of us had been with the wild animals,” he recalled. The tiger’s trainer — Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, long before his appearance in “Tiger King” made him famous — instructed them on the protocol for sharing the stage with a huge, inherently wild animal.

“It kind of boiled down to staying out of the animal’s sight lines and that there couldn’t be anything to distract it,” Swanson said. “Nothing that dangled or moved in a way that might attract the tiger’s attention.”

“Well,” Mueller said, “Britney’s entire look, with the dancing trailing fabric and feathers, her hair….Britney was basically a shiny life-sized cat toy for one giant cat!”

Spears’s head choreographer, the 18-year-old Wade Robson, slightly reworked the staging with Antle to keep Spears out of the sightline.

Swanson and Mueller were eager to be a part of shaping a new sartorial era for the singer. They also designed her look in the “I’m a Slave 4 U” music video that premiered weeks later, incorporating similar motifs — like bold jewel hues and flowing chiffon detailing — so the two projects could feel connected.

“We loved the colors of the jungle, iridescent beetle green, electric colors of exotic birds, insects, flowers,” Swanson said. “Fuschia, emerald, turquoise, acid yellow all became the palette for this performance. We loved the iconic curvy silhouettes of jungle warrior princesses in the art of Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo. We were obsessed with traditional belly dancing and the way fabric moved and jewelry and ornamentation would jingle and accentuate the shape of the choreography.”

“The way that Britney moves was always what pushed our design,” Mueller said. “The way she performed ‘Slave’ specifically, shaped the look.”

Tech in a totally different world

Spears’ MTV performance was also one of the first set-designing jobs led by Ray Winkler, the CEO and design director of STUFISH Entertainment Architects. Winkler recalled having only three weeks to work with MTV and Spears’s creative team to produce the stage design, at a time when digital collaboration was in its early infancy. There were no pre-production Zoom meetings, but rather the juggle of scheduling international calls and waiting for another part of the world to wake up in order to receive vital feedback.

“Those days meant hard core sketching, sketching again, scanning, and believe it or not, we had to fax things,” Winkler said. “LA, New York, London. How do you align? You didn’t have the internet to tell you what time it was exactly where, you know, or people couldn’t just respond, say, “Oh, I can’t do this..”

What Winkler landed on with Robson, was the concept of elevated welded cages that the singer and her crew of dancers would dance around on.

“I was very worried about the welds of the cage being strong enough to contain the tiger,” said Winkler. Ahead of the televised performance, he said, the animal handlers fed the feline “a lot of raw steaks” to ensure it wouldn’t be hungry on stage. “I don’t know if you would get away with that in this day and age.” “I call that time sort of within an envelope of innocence because social media didn’t exist,” Winkler said. “We — the team, producers, artists, production — had pretty much exclusive access to how this would be portrayed to the wider audiences because nobody in the live audience had a mobile phone that they could record it. The director’s cut was the only cut that was made available.”

That level of control helped give the performance its enduring power. “It was very, very tailor-made to her,” Winkler said. “ It was made for what I would still call the analog MTV consumer. And I often wonder whether this had been done in this day and age now if it would have the same impact, just because it has to vie with so many other flashpoints of interest, and the attention span, which was already terrible in the early noughties, is completely evaporated now. She was an icon at the time, and still is, to be clear. But at the time that this happened, it cemented her status as somebody who was willing to take risks, and it was a big risk. But she pulled it off.”

Debunking the pop puppet myth

Brian Friedman, one of Spears’ longtime choreographers and dancers, knew even before they hit the stage at the VMAs that year that “I’m a Slave 4 U” would strike a chord with listeners. The sultry dance moves seen on stage and in the music video was also one of the first major credited choreographing gigs Friedman had received at that point in his career. Alongside Robson, the pair went on to create some of Spears’ most recognizable dance breaks, still recreated and performed by fans to this day.

“I was completely obsessed with the song the second that I heard it and the choreographic process with Wade and I — it just flowed,” Friedman said. “When we first played around with the choreography at her house, it was just undeniable that it was going to be a smash. Never did I think that it was going to be what ‘Thriller’ and ‘Rhythm Nation’ were to me as a kid growing up. It truly has stood the test of time and become one of those landmark pop dance moments.”

Friedman was clued into every creative update as it came, including the inclusion of the live snake and tiger.

“We’re both maximalists when it comes to visuals,” he said. “She had done so many performances that it gets to the point where you’re thinking, well, what haven’t we done? What can we do to stand out and make a memorable performance?” Friedman is also acutely aware that now there’s a new lens to look through when people revisit a Britney Spears performance. In her 2023 memoir “The Woman In Me,” Spears described the conservatorship and her then grueling performance schedule as the “death to my creativity as an artist.” Friedman remembers a period of time however — pre-conservatorship — when Spears was in control of her career, and witnessed her thrive.

“A lot of people feel that she was some sort of manufactured pop star or a puppet in some sort of way, and that couldn’t have been further from the truth. Especially in that era, she was such a hard worker,” he shared. “Her schedule was being pushed on her, but the work ethic wasn’t. She truly loved what she was doing. She loved being on stage, and she loved to sweat and be in the dance studio in rehearsals with the dancers.”

A void in the pop-sphere

Could there be another Britney Spears? Should there be one? Latter-day stars politely shrug off the comparisons; fans are chastened by having witnessed how fame — and a craving for control — undid their favorite performer.

“She has made it very clear that she doesn’t want to be performing right now, so I honor that in her and respect her wishes,” Friedman said. Still, he said, the sight of Spears’s idol Madonna flourishing at the age of 68 leaves him hoping Britney might someday get back onstage again.

Horsburgh, the writer and culture critic, said that Spears’s past triumphs stand on their own.

“Of course you miss Britney Spears, and of course you want another album, and you want another tour — but I actually hope that she never goes back to the stage ever again if she doesn’t want to, and her fanbase and the general public can understand and respect that,” said Horbough. “Clearly, she doesn’t communicate often, but when she does, she’s been very clear — ‘I’m not performing ever again. I’m finished.’ We as fans have to ask less right now, not ask more of her. She’s got such a huge legacy and such a catalog of incredible music, incredible visuals, incredible albums — that legacy should be preserved.”