If you were a ‘90s baby who lived and breathed Disney Channel like myself and my friends, Hilary Duff was absolutely our idol. The actress, who landed Lizzie McGuire after a crazy audition was relatable in the role, oozing with Y2K style and had tons of catchy hits in her music career. So when I found out that Duff headlined her first show in 18 years on Monday in London, it made me emotional and nostalgic. I particularly can’t get over how she chose to bring “With Love” into the show.
For the past decade, Duff hasn’t made any new music, and understandably so considering she has had her hands full with four kids (her youngest baby was announced just a couple of years ago). She’s also been the star of two TV shows: Younger, which totally crushed on streaming last year, and How I Met Your Father, which we still wish hadn’t been cancelled. But since she has a new album coming out next month, Duff decided to go back on tour and do a few shows, and this happened:
Hilary Duff played a lot of her oldies at the concert on Monday including “Wake Up,” “So Yesterday,” “Why Not,” “Come Clean” and “What Dreams Are Made Of”. But during her performance of “With Love” she invited three fans on stage to do her iconic dance with her, and it was such a sweet moment!
In recent years, Duff went viral for her 2007 appearance on Good Morning America where she performed “With Love” in New York City in front of fans. It’s one of those random videos from the past that mysteriously made its way back onto the internet, and has become the subject of a lot of memes and fan TikToks. Check out this popular one:
Back in 2021, the original video inspired the #hilaryduffchallenge, where tons of people were taken to TikTok to do the dance at varied levels of “effort.” Here’s another one:
Sure, the “With Love” dance going viral kind of makes fun of Hilary Duff’s moves, but more so on the dance itself, which a choreographer must have cooked up for her. In a recent interview with Variety, Duff said she was “so glad people have so much joy” recreating the dance, but has “layered” feelings about it since she feels like the moment is a reflection of her “struggling to be who she was” at the time.
Clearly she decided to embrace the dance at her first concert back, and it looks like she was having a blast with it. On an Instagram post following the show, she wrote this:
18 years later, and I still can’t quite make sense of it all. I’ve imagined what it might feel like to return to the stage, but last night was something else entirely. The love, the community, the energy…it met me in a way I wasn’t prepared for. Thank you for walking with me all these years, for celebrating what was while embracing what’s becoming. I don’t know how I ended up here, but I know I’m exactly where I’m meant to be. Truly what dreams are made of - but real
Hilary Duff is heading to Toronto for another show this weekend, before playing concerts in NYC, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. I’m hoping she’ll do the “With Love” dance at every show, and I can’t wait to see more videos like this if she does. Her new album “luck… or something” comes out on February 20.
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