The best Britney Spears collabs bring together the most distinctive parts of her pop star persona with something new, like the funky coed remix of her 2001 song “Boys” with Pharrell Williams or her 2010 photo shoot with Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami for Pop magazine.
California-based Welcome Skateboards managed to get that balance right, mashing up pop star nostalgia with punk rock streetwear for its Britney Spears x Welcome collection. The 25-piece capsule brings vintage Britney graphics to $90 hoodies and $85 skateboard decks, and features catchphrases from songs like “Give Me a Sign” and “I Still Believe” from “…Baby One More Time” on $40 tees.
DECKED OUT WITH BRITNEY INSPIRATION
The Princess of Pop’s references and influence often show up in fashion and apparel. She was the face of French luxury house Kenzo’s 2018 denim-heavy capsule collection, and, more recently, younger pop stars have looked to her for inspiration. Halsey wore a nude diamond bodysuit to reference “Toxic” in the music video for her new song, “Lucky,” that samples the Spears song of the same name. Tate McRae recently wore a “Sexsi” crop top for a Pop magazine photo shoot à la Spears in the early 2000s. And Ice Spice showed up to last year’s MTV Video Music Awards in an outfit reminiscent of one Spears wore to the ceremony 20 years earlier (itself a reference to a look made iconic by Madonna in the 1980s).
Spears’s debut album is now 25 years old, but the fight to end her conservatorship plus her bestselling 2023 memoir, The Woman In Me, have brought her story and music to new audiences. No wonder Britney nostalgia is in full swing. Welcome’s collection taps into that nostalgia with just the right level of subversion.
EARLY CAREER CALLBACKS
The collection features visual callbacks to early Spears hits and albums, too. One such illustration of Spears is based on a photo from the “…Baby One More Time” music video, with added angel wings and a sparkling orb to reference a fairy motif from the packaging of some of her early CDs. Skateboard decks show the image of Spears posing on a pink background from the cover of her debut album or performing “I’m a Slave 4 U” with a snake at the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards. “Not That Innocent,” a line from “Oops!… I Did It Again,” appears on trucker hats like the ones Spears wore in the 2000s.
Although the collection leans heavily toward Y2K, TRL-era Britney, there are references to her later music, including “Work Bitch” and “Till the World Ends,” songs with music videos in which Spears played her womanizer-hunting, bullwhip-cracking femme fatale character. The color palette of the Britney Spears x Welcome Skateboards collection is pink and black, which captures the duality that is Britney Spears.
A CELEBRATION OF THE PRINCESS OF POP
“This collection is more than an ode to our favorite pop star, it’s a celebration of a generational icon who has influenced music, fashion, and pop culture as a whole for decades, and the enduring resilience required to achieve that,” Welcome Skateboards said in a statement. “It is a testament to the way different subcultures that may seem at odds can coexist and enrich one another.”
The curly, girly “Britney Spears” logo used for her debut album is also the logo chosen for the Welcome Skateboards collection, and it couldn’t look more different in style from Welcome’s own heavy metal-style logo. It’s ironic, yes, but it also works—because the truth is, Spears has always been a little rock ’n’ roll.