$650,000 in pop star memorabilia? These superfans know few limits.

By DERRICK BRYSON TAYLOR

In a room in his London house, 52-year-old spray tan artist James Harknett has carefully arranged more than 12,500 items connected, in one way or another, to Madonna.

Along with CDs, vinyl records, store displays and magazines including Smash Hits and Record Mirror, Harknett’s collection includes an oversize rhinestone bracelet that the pop megastar flaunted in her video for “Material Girl” in 1985, not one but three of the costumes that she wore in the Academy Award-winning film “Evita,” from 1996, and more than 200 pieces of framed imagery.

It all began when Harknett was 11 (“I was completely captivated,” he said), and he estimates that over the past four decades he has shelled out more than $650,000 on Madonna memorabilia. In 2004, he wanted to buy a mint-condition copy of a vintage issue of Island magazine, which featured Madonna on the cover, but tickets to 18 stops of her Re-Invention tour that year meant he couldn’t afford it.

Harknett is far from alone in his zealous commitment to collecting a beloved megastar’s memorabilia — and these days, as he and his fellow devotees are keenly aware, there are perhaps more collectibles out there than ever before. (Just ask Taylor Swift’s marketing team.)

The problem: The hobby can get expensive quickly, and certain holy grail items, such as that issue of Island, are rarely cheap.

In August, for instance, a sheer catsuit embellished with crystals that Whitney Houston wore onstage in 1991 sold at auction for $22,400. In November, an original print of the artwork for David Bowie’s “Aladdin Sane” album cover sold for more than $500,000. And in December, a Bob Mackie dress that Cher wore in 1978 went for nearly $58,000.

Even if you can afford it, pop culture memorabilia can be a chancy investment. According to Claire Tole-Moir, who oversees the popular culture and science department at the auction house Bonhams, for household names including the Beatles or Jimi Hendrix, “If there’s only one particular guitar or important stage clothing or set of handwritten lyrics, then it’s going to always be important.”

For other artists, it is harder to predict if their memorabilia will climb in value — tastes tend to be fickle. To obsessive collectors like Harknett, though, the potential financial rewards are hardly the point. As Tole-Moir put it, “If you love it, then you will always get some return.”

And Harknett loves Madonna.

“By surrounding myself with her music and memorabilia, I felt comforted and excited,” he said. “I viewed them as souvenirs of my devotion to her art and genuine love to the gay community.”

For Zachary Gordon-Abraham, who works for a soda company in northeastern Pennsylvania, the love flows to Britney Spears.

Gordon-Abraham, 30, was a young child when his mother gave him a Britney Spears doll. It turned out to be a catalyst to collecting thousands of pieces of Spears memorabilia.

“My mom started to instill in me collecting things, like valuing them, not playing with them,” Gordon-Abraham said.

After the doll came Spears-focused VHS tapes and DVDs, and then ephemera like bubble gum and hit clips all bearing her name and image. In 2022, he commissioned a custom-made doll with an outfit created from the fabric of one of her tour costumes, which a wardrobe designer for Spears had given him.

Gordon-Abraham allowed that he sometimes fantasized about selling it all. “But so much of it holds so much sentimental value,” he said. (The New York Post once valued Gordon-Abraham’s collection at $137,000, but he said it was “priceless” because so many of the items were old or out of circulation.)

George Newman, a psychologist who teaches at the University of Toronto, said supercollectors felt the same heartache in parting with items that so many others do. “Many people find those to be irreplaceable and would be devastated if they lost it,” he said.

This kind of hard-core collecting — driven by a deep emotional bond but also by a belief in what Newman called contagion (that a celebrity’s star power transfers itself to an associated object) — has, in fact, been around for thousands of years. Robert Thompson, who studies popular culture at Syracuse University, said the trend dated to ancient Rome, where Pliny the Elder was a noted autograph collector.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, collectors including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johannes Brahms compiled their autographs into albums. “You’d carry these books around, and it became a kind of testament to all the important people you knew,” Thompson said.

But it wasn’t always autographs. Within three days of Beethoven’s death in 1827, so many mourners had clipped tufts of his hair that they had turned a head famous for its flowing locks into a bald pate.

Francie Elliott, 49, of Clarksville, Tennessee, says she has about 1,000 items — magazines, T-shirts, cups, tapes, blankets, Christmas decorations — in her “Mariah Room,” though she admits she has lost exact count. Her passion for Mariah Carey, she estimates, has cost her anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000.

“Every concert, I fly to Vegas or wherever she’s at,” said Elliott, who works as a human resources manager at a pipe-manufacturing facility. “So that’s the airfare, the stay, the ticket, the meet-and-greet, the memorabilia. It’s expensive, but I don’t even think about it.”

Elliott was first drawn to Carey in the early 1990s, soon after her family moved to Clarksville from Los Angeles. Not many people resembled her there, she said (she identifies as Hispanic), and she came to see herself in Carey’s hair and skin tone.

“I just kind of gravitated toward her with my identity,” Elliott said. She has found solace in Carey ever since, especially as she mourned her husband’s unexpected death several years ago.

“Her music has helped me get through things in life,” she said.