“With a style of your lips, I’m on a trip”! Twenty years in the past, Britney Spears launched her banger single “Poisonous,” and I’ve but to get well from its accompanying music video. Sampling the Indian Hindi tune “Tere Mere Beech Mein” by Lata Mangeshkar and S. P. Balasubrahmanyam, the earworm-y monitor is a catchy piece of pop genius, and the action-packed music video is simply as magical. Directed by Joseph Kahn, “Poisonous” reimagines Spears as some kind of spy-slash-assassin who’s on a mission to poison her dishonest ex. The idea, dreamed up by Spears, sees her in an array of fashionable disguises, starting from a horny flight attendant to a leather-clad vixen. 

The video has all of it. Motion! Trend! A random steamy bathe scene! However nothing tops the vary of iconic costumes. Let’s begin with the princess of pop’s first outfit: Up excessive within the sky, we meet Spears as a flight attendant. Her azure blue getup—a futuristic, sharp-shoulder minidress with a keyhole cutout—comes full with slightly cap and chandelier earrings. The look, which has since change into an iconic Halloween costume, was created customized for Spears by designer Jeremy Scott. Spears then follows it up together with her most well-known “Poisonous” look—which isn’t an ensemble in any respect however somewhat simply her naked physique coated totally in glued-on diamonds. (No, it’s not a catsuit, opposite to well-liked perception.)

Enjoying up the dressed-to-kill vibe, Spears then emerges in a skintight black catsuit with leather-based harness accents—to trip on a motorbike with Tyson Beckford, naturally. It wouldn’t be a 2000s video with out a sizzling man within the combine. Her outfit—full with a shiny purple wig and futuristic sun shades—has been so influential that Taylor Swift channeled it in her 2014 “Unhealthy Blood” video, which shares the same plot (solely there Swift is out for revenge on her backstabbing good friend, performed by Selena Gomez).

The pièce de résistance, in the meantime, comes on the climactic finish of the video, when Spears scales a skyscraper, backflips into the penthouse, and eventually confronts her ex in a leather-based bra, pants, opera gloves, and a dramatic sheer cape. Of us, they fairly merely don’t do pop movies like this anymore. And 20 years later, I nonetheless can’t cease rewatching it. It’s the best pop video ever made. To cite the tune, “I’m hooked on you—don’t you already know that you just’re poisonous?”