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If you were a preteen girl at my particular school in 2002, there was only one video game in existence, and that was Lizzie McGuire: Outfit Design. Once, this web-based video game was revolutionary. For free, you could play on the Disney website (now miraculously semi-intact here) and take a virtual tour through Lizzie McGuire’s closet. Much like Lizzie herself, you too could build a wardrobe of the most radioactively insane outfits. Floral-print midi skirt and leopard-print top. Pink tank top with a tie-dye heart and a teeny denim skirt with a brown fringe belt. Spiky half-updo with a purple headband. A red purse with a photo of a bunch of dogs on it. (Lizzie did not have a dog.) Platform thong flip-flops.
The clothes were lively and adventurous but approachable, a perfect encapsulation of Lizzie’s outfits on the eponymous Disney show. Much like Raven-Symoné’s lace-up high-heeled boots on That’s So Raven, or Miley Cyrus’ blunt streaked blond bangs on Hannah Montana, the outfits herein would’ve looked bananas on anyone other than an actress like Hilary Duff. Toothy grin, spaghetti blond hair, sparkling blue eyes—she was the only preteen who could ever bring Lizzie to life, and maybe the only young girl who could make every other little girl feel as if she could somehow be Lizzie too.
Such was Duff’s entire appeal. She was somehow customizable, a girl’s girl only lightly obsessed with boys and status (just like the rest of us), not totally sure of herself but determined to find out who she was destined to be. Lizzie and Duff became synonymous with each other, cultural touchpoints for millennial girls. She was a girl like so many others across the country who weren’t the most popular in school but weren’t the least. Lizzie was a good friend and an average student. She had no particularly obvious skills, except in the 2003 feature film, in which she became a singer through Disney-dubious means. She was anyone with the lightest inferiority complex or the smallest bud of self-confidence. She was you! And you loved her.
Now 38, Duff is riding that 20-year-old wave of mild, uncomplicated loyalty into the release of her first album in a decade, and her first major tour in two. Luck … or Something comes out today, and she’s still selling tickets for a North American tour that starts this spring. It’s an ambitious tour, one that puts her in Madison Square Garden, twice.
But there’s a reason to bet on her; earlier this year, she sold out stints for the charmingly named “Small Rooms, Big Nerves” mini-tour in London and Brooklyn, with outrageous resale prices to boot. It’s no wonder elder millennials are seeking out someone like Duff—what a blissful reminder of the easier parts of the aughts! Everyone in attendance, even Duff herself, is seeking access to that teenage joy. At her January show, she walked out in a 2000s-era light denim two-piece—much like the Justin and Britney Canadian tuxedos of 2001—and sang “What Dreams Are Made Of,” from the Lizzie McGuire Movie soundtrack. She even re-created the Disney Channel bumper that used to air between episodes. She’s toying with her own fame, similar to how the Backstreet Boys might on a Coinbase ad, except her version feels a lot more fun, far less desperate, and not nearly as craven.
This isn’t a redemption tour. Duff barely has anything to be redeemed from—her biggest scandals have to do with getting veneers too big for her face and maybe-feuding with her sister over Ashley French’s essay about mom friend groups in the Cut. Instead, she has managed to capture her own nostalgia and profit off it instead of watching it get turned into a docuseries or spinoff. (Though they did indeed try the reboot.)
In her self-directed Duffessance, she has reframed herself smartly. Few child stars can transmute a just-like-you quality from childhood into adulthood. For almost the entirety of the 21st century, Duff has managed to be a household name, all because of a couple of seasons on a Disney Channel show. Her branding, and her creative work, has always made her the everygirl, someone who flops (only a little) and eventually soars (modestly). Duff has long struggled to fully pull herself out from under the Disney-child-star bus and will, for most of her audience, forever be Lizzie McGuire at any age. The clever trick is that she seems to have stopped trying to.
The 2003 “It’s Totally Raining Teens!” cover of Vanity Fair is, decades later, lore for the pop culture–obsessed. The cover folded out to show nine of the industry’s most powerful young women, actresses on the cusp of celebrity beyond child stardom or kids’ programming. Browse it and you get a catalog of both incredible success and devastating chaos: Mandy Moore, who is still close with Duff today, alongside the Olsen twins, Amanda Bynes, Lindsay Lohan, and Evan Rachel Wood. This was one of the final eras of monoculture, and one of the most important cultural institutions for high-minded grown-ups was featuring just a bunch of girls next door.
Most of these actresses had their own version of a fall from grace, though almost all of them are still household names. But Duff—placed on the cover before the foldout, securing a dominant position among teen actors—was the one your parents always liked. Talk about disproportionate impact: Lizzie McGuire ran for only two seasons but is still one of the most influential pieces of kids’ programming for English-speaking millennials everywhere.
Lizzie spun out about her crushes, she failed tests, she lied to her parents, she got a fake nose ring. But at her core? Lizzie was good. She was kind and friendly and only periodically misguided. Her skills were typical, and her failures were mundane. Her family was filled out by a neurotic mother, an unhelpful father, and an annoying little brother. She had a cool Hispanic female friend (Miranda) and a lame male friend (Gordo) who was obviously harboring a crush on her so intense that it couldn’t be contained by a mere television series and would require a movie for full closure. She was white, thin (but not too thin!), blond, straight, and easygoing. Her crush on Ethan Craft and her feud with former friend–turned–mean girl Kate Sanders gave Lizzie more relatability: Who hasn’t lost a friend to the cool crowd, and who hasn’t had a crush on some dork-ass named Ethan?
Unlike most of her Disney contemporaries, there was something dutifully regular about Lizzie and about Duff. Cyrus was a secret pop star in Hannah Montana; as a real pop star under her own name, she was dogged by paparazzi as quasi-famous offspring seeking her own form of sexuality in public as she became an adult. That’s So Raven was about an exceptional teenager with psychic abilities and an incredible wardrobe of coordinated jean outfits; Symoné was successful outside the franchise, but as a Black girl who wasn’t a Size 2 (along with steady rumors about her sexuality), she too was maligned and mocked. Duff was considered more approachable as but another white girl on the Disney Channel, and thus became less of a target for public cruelty. She didn’t have parents like Dina or Michael Lohan (hers weren’t perfect, merely less high-profile), nor did she have racial or queer politics to navigate publicly.
Duff worked consistently but still stayed mostly undersaturated into her adulthood. Around and after Lizzie McGuire’s heyday, she also appeared in Cadet Kelly and Cheaper by the Dozen, both Disney products, as well as a face in other teen programming, like A Cinderella Story and Agent Cody Banks. In all her roles, she continued to play a variation of, frankly, Lizzie: upbeat, charmante, a little confused but still blazing forward with contagious hope. Her 2003 album Metamorphosis was certified platinum within months of its release when she was just 16, sold about 5 million copies worldwide, and, since it was released so soon after The Lizzie McGuire Movie, offered plenty of synergy. In many ways, she was exactly what Disney wanted: to produce young talent into a profitable television show, a movie, an album, and, hopefully, a prolific career, sans the pitfalls of every other child star around her.
Duff had a few controversies, but hers were practically prosaic compared to the other girls on the Disney Channel. Nude photos of her never leaked. She was never caught smoking weed or doing drugs or drinking underage. There are no rehab stays or controversial political statements. Her father spent 10 days in jail around costs he owed his estranged wife for Duff’s 21st birthday, but her only significant personal apologia came because of a 2016 Halloween costume. She was dressed in pilgrimwear (no pants, but with the hat for good measure), and her then boyfriend, Jason Walsh, was in a headdress, red face paint, and a great deal of fringe. Instead, her scandals are all somewhat puerile, the kind of behavior indicative of a young person figuring things out kind of awkwardly. Duff’s scandals aren’t death-defying or unforgivable. They’re just kind of gawky, and sometimes completely frivolous.
If Duff is famous to you, then her 2005 set of veneers are too. She seemed to have gotten them around the same time she lost an obvious amount of weight, and the blogs were dutifully cruel about them. “Hil Duff Speaks About the Horse Teeth,” reads the title of a 2005 blog post from Oh No They Didn’t. Duff was at the forefront of a kind of dental work that’s now a ubiquitous part of the beauty industry. Back then, barely 18 years old, it got her nothing but published insults.
The dental work was a part of a constellation of physical changes Duff went through: darker hair, significantly skinnier body, larger teeth, more makeup, higher heels, lower-waisted jeans. Now she looks back on an eating disorder she had at 17. The culture was so harsh that even in the cruelty Duff tolerated—Perez Hilton a notable and frequent antagonist, though they seem to have made up—she got off comparatively easy. The metamorphosis (sorry) for teenage girls navigating their burgeoning sexuality in the public space is always brutal, but Duff was still given a little more room than her peers. The Olsen twins and Symoné felt like public property since they had been barely sentient when they first became famous on Full House and The Cosby Show, respectively; tabloids and viewers alike had a kind of ownership over them that they could never really shake.
In Duff’s dating life, scandal was present but still limited. She had a brief childhood relationship with Aaron Carter, who remained fixated on her even as an adult. A few days before his death, he talked about her on a podcast as the one who got away. When he died in 2022, she wrote about him on Instagram: “Boy did my teenage self love you deeply.” When she was 16, she began dating Good Charlotte singer Joel Madden, then 25. Creepy though it is on paper (and in practice!), the couple were covered by tabloids as if they were just two cute teenagers in love. People magazine called them “synergizing sweethearts” in 2005, once Duff was 18, remarking on their “16 month” relationship.
Later, she even managed to keep her divorce from hockey player Mike Comrie, with whom she shares one son, from becoming much of a media circus. (For a second there, everyone thought she had given him a blow job after he gave her an engagement ring, which, you know, many such cases.) “It was just a slow set-in of us not being the match that we used to be,” she told Cosmopolitan in 2015.
As child stars move into adulthood, there’s always discourse around whether they’ll ever reach the same dizzying heights of their teen sitcom. But for Duff, isn’t the success her supreme normalness? That she’s stayed in the industry for nearly 25 years, consistently, with minimal chaos? She will likely never be as famous as Cyrus or Selena Gomez. Instead, she has a piece of both: the renown of someone famous since puberty, and the mundanity of someone who never fell all the way into the looking glass.
In her adulthood, Duff has made the kinds of decisions that further cement her as the everygirl. She never broke into the grown-up movie space, but she has quietly dominated television. (Her most recent movie was 2019’s The Haunting of Sharon Tate, which was loathed critically and commercially.) She spent seven seasons on Younger and appeared on The Talk and The Bachelor before starring on How I Met Your Father. She got married again, in 2019, to producer Matthew Koma and had three more children. In her marriage and public exposure of private family moments on Instagram, she finds room again to be the best version of the everygirl. She’s a working mother with a gaggle of kids, managing parenting, and even better, she has a husband who seems to like her very much.
And when she goes viral, which she is wont to do now and then as a fixture of early-aughts pop culture, she leans all the way in. Remember that mortifying little dance she did on an outdoor stage for the Today show in 2007? She did it again, this time onstage at the Brooklyn Paramount earlier this year. She knows you’re laughing. It’s OK: She is too.
Millennial girls grew up with Duff, and so to meet her as a mom of four in her own little squabble with a fellow mother in her community feels like catching up with an old friend whose life has somehow still followed yours. At the beginning of the year, fellow Disney Channel star Ashley French (née Tisdale) wrote an essay for the Cut about breaking up with her mom friend group. Rumors quickly spread that it was about, in part, Mandy Moore, Meghan Trainor, and, finally, Hilary Duff. Duff’s relationship to the feud seemed obvious, especially since her husband posted on Instagram calling French “the most self-obsessed, tonedeaf person on Earth.” Duff’s sister Haylie has since been spending plenty of time with French. Quelle drama.
It’s a little silly, this fight among rich white women in Los Angeles, B- and C-list celebrities who have the time to argue on the Cut’s dime. But is there anything more familiar? How millennial white mom is it to get pulled into some passive-aggressive argument with a parent you keep running into while in the pickup line at school? Yet again, Duff is but a relatable proxy for her own audience: Look, even I have to deal with this shit on the PTA.
Duff addresses her extraordinarily ordinary life on Luck … or Something, which launched with two completely-fine singles. She still sounds like she’s 16—which is to say, her voice hasn’t aged much, even if the lyrics have gotten decidedly more world-weary. “Mature” is an ode to a man dating younger women to feel dominant: “She looks / Like she could be your daughter / Like me before I got smarter.” Her other single, “Roommates,” will resonate with any woman in a stagnant marriage: “Life is lifin’, and pressure is pressurin’ me,” she sings before a line about blowing someone in a dive bar and jerking off alone.
The songs are OK. “It’s nice to like something so wholesome,” Pitchfork declared in its 6.3 review. “This is music you’ve heard before: fizzy, centrist pop, precisely positioned at the crossroads of autobiography and universality.” You’ll hear some songs from this record a few times this year and then maybe never again. At her tour, audiences will sway politely to the new tracks but scream-sing “So Yesterday” as if their lives depend on it. But whatever she makes next won’t be beyond your reach as even a casual fan. Duff was never supposed to be an unreachable, impossible pop star. She was never supposed to be Isabella Parigi, the pop star who looks just like Lizzie McGuire in the movie adaptation. She was just a girl, just like you, and that was always enough.
