Hilary Duff is back on stage. For many, it may be “just” a concert, but for Millennials it feels more like plunging into a past we never really left. A past still warmed by a nostalgia too beautiful to ever go cold, and one for which Hilary Duff wrote part of the soundtrack. Her music never simply played in the background. It became part of growing up during the rise and coronation of pop, which is why her Lucky Me Tour feels like a return to the analog years: headphones with hopelessly tangled cords, overplayed CD players and bedrooms closed off from the world while an inner life was beginning to take shape through song lyrics. Opening at the Financial Amphitheater in West Palm Beach, Florida, Hilary Duff brings some of her biggest hits back to the stage with a setlist that spans early singles such as Come Clean and some of her most dramatic anthems, Fly included. Ending with the finale that children of the Nineties had been dreaming of their whole lives.
Lucky Me Tour: Hilary Duff’s Setlist Tells the Story of a Y2K Adolescence
Before becoming a pop star, Hilary Duff won over audiences as Lizzie McGuire, the heroine of one of the most successful shows in Disney Channel history. Airing from 2001 to 2004, the series helped define a new era of teen television for the network, becoming the first original live-action scripted teen sitcom. Its success came from the way it captured adolescence in all its awkward, sprinkle-dusted complexity, from school problems to real friendships, from first crushes to dreams of glory.
Guided by an animated alter ego who broke the fourth wall, spoke directly to viewers and invited them into Lizzie’s most secret (and therefore most authentic) thoughts, Lizzie McGuire later arrived in theaters with a film partly shot in Italy. There, the high school girl finally reveals her singing talent to the world and becomes a pop star. And yet Hilary Duff’s real gift was building two parallel careers with equal strength. On one side, acting, with roles that included several rom-coms. On the other, music, which reached global success with albums such as Metamorphosis and Most Wanted, along with singles that made an entire generation sing, dance and cry.
From Songs to Looks: Hilary Duff Takes Us Back to the Early 2000s
During the first stop of her Lucky Me Tour, Hilary Duff brought some of her most iconic songs back to the stage, including Come Clean, Wake Up, So Yesterday, Fly and Beat of My Heart, all drawn from her early albums. She did it with the inexhaustible energy of an artist who, like her audience, seems to have stepped outside of age altogether.
The same freshness came through in the glitter-heavy glamour of her looks. The artist wore baggy jeans covered in denim patches by The Attico with an asymmetrical custom top dripping in crystals by Kelsey Randall, later switching into a total pink organza crop top with a train designed by Selezza London. She also revisited full Y2K fantasy with a printed T-shirt purchased on eBay (that’s for all our second-hand lovers!) and Haikure ripped jeans. But the show reached its peak, musically and sartorially, with a Kelsey Randall mini dress made of layered fringe and pastel-toned stars that recall the glow-in-the-dark galaxies lighting up the sky on the roof of our bed, paired with Gianvito Rossi silver lamé heeled boots. A constellation of memories worn to sing What Dreams Are Made Of, the song written for The Lizzie McGuire Movie. Radiant in her performance and in the joy of returning to her audience, Hilary Duff has grown up for sure, but she reminded us that becoming an adult, for real, actually means learning how to have fun.
