My love for many people has been deep and true, but for a pivotal stretch of my youth, the person I loved most was Christina Aguilera. This millennial devotion began, as so many did, in the aisles of a record store. My father offered me a choice, and I selected ‘Stripped,’ her newly released second album. Driving home, I slotted the CD into the player, rolled down the car window, and felt my old self—a girl still clinging to cartoon dogs and rainbow skirts—dissipate on the breeze. In its place rushed a new, intoxicating possibility: perhaps I was really a misunderstood woman with a powerful voice and poetic angst, just waiting for the right pair of low-rise jeans to make it official.
What followed was a dedicated era of fandom, constructed from the early internet’s raw materials. I built GeoCities shrines, carefully peeled magazine posters from their staples, and sported a faux nose ring from Claire’s. My Nokia trilled with ‘Fighter,’ I practiced the ‘Dirrty’ dance routine with solemn focus, and the brochure from her 2003 tour lived beside my bed like a sacred text. Then, as swiftly as it arrived, the fever broke. The obsession receded, leaving behind a scattered archive: a tin pencil case bearing her image, a crumpled poster of those infamous chaps. To an outsider, mere nostalgic junk. To me, they were magical buoys that had kept me afloat in the chaotic seas of adolescence.
This universal power of celebrity devotion, and the intricate identities we build around it, is the very heart of ‘Holy Pop!,’ a new exhibition at London’s Somerset House. It transforms the gallery into a teenager’s most private sanctuary, filled with shrines and souvenirs dedicated to icons from The Spice Girls to Elvis. Here, the glow of vintage perfume bottles feels like stained glass, diamanté-covered pews shimmer, and hastily scrawled love letters speak of private worlds. As curator Tory Turk explained, “The exhibition is obviously about pop culture, but it’s also about people, and how we navigate life. The things that we hook onto to make us survive life and feel a sense of belonging.” She notes the therapeutic, meaningful act of curating these personal collections, a practice she began by “collecting collectors” who cherished the “tacky or strange” objects often dismissed by traditional design canons.
This impulse to venerate speaks to a deeper, almost spiritual, need in an increasingly secular world. The novelist Sally Rooney has described modern celebrity worship as “a malignant growth where the sacred used to be.” And while the parasocial relationships fostered by such idolatry can indeed be complex, ‘Holy Pop!’ argues there is an endearing, deeply human creativity to it as well. The artifacts on display—a heart-shaped mirror adorned with George Michael stickers, a pastel tribute wreath, a Yellow Submarine cookie jar repurposed as an urn—reveal how fandom inspires community, connection, and a uniquely clumsy enchantment. Certain icons, like Dolly Parton or Elvis, seem to possess a timeless, prophetic magic. As Turk observes of The King, “He became like Jesus, you know. A prophet.”
The exhibition culminates in a darkened room, where a single, small object is illuminated: a cloudy piece of chewing gum. This is the gum Nina Simone placed on her piano during a 1999 London concert, later retrieved by musician Warren Ellis, who saw in it a “hallowed relic.” It is the ultimate testament to the exhibition’s theme. As anyone who has ever treasured a flea market find or pondered an abandoned personal item knows, the most mundane objects can become vessels of profound connection. These artifacts represent more than society’s shift toward celebrity worship; they embody our deep desire to physically hold onto a specific feeling, time, or person who made us feel seen and understood.
In the end, the mementos we so carefully preserve are never solely shrines to the stars themselves. They are shrines to our former selves—to the people we were in the moment that lyric resonated, that poster went on the wall, that dance routine was mastered. They are testaments to the versions of us who loved something, or someone, unashamedly and with our whole hearts, finding a sense of identity and belonging in the glow of a pop culture icon. ‘Dirrty’ dance routines and all, these collections are a celebration of the human need to connect, to worship, and to remember.
