Hilary siert de cover van de februari 2026 editie van de Amerikaanse editie van Glamour Magazine, hiervoor had ze een fotoshoot en interview met het tijdschrift welke vandaag verscheen!

Galerij Links:
http//: Emmanuel Monsalve (Glamour VS)
http//: Emmanuel Monsalve (Glamour VS) – Behind The Scenes
http//: februari 2026: Glamour (VS)

With a personal new album, an upcoming world tour, and four kids at home, the millennial icon opens up about growing up in public, tabloid culture, and why this moment just feels right.

It’s a freezing Tuesday in January, and Hilary Duff is on stage at the Brooklyn Paramount, but you could barely hear the music. More than 2,500 superfans are going wild because they’re witnessing the infamous “With Love” dance in real time; the “go girl, give us nothing” routine that blew up on TikTok for its adorably lackluster energy. You’d never know that when a minidress-clad Duff performed the routine on the Today show in 2007—and a handful of times before and after—she was doing so as an embarrassed teenager.

“That has not been a fun thing to follow me around,” she tells me a week later in Los Angeles. When she watches the past footage of that dance, she doesn’t see a 19-year-old attempting a fairly uninspired routine, but recognizes a time when every movement—not just choreo—felt outside of her control.

“[I] didn’t want to be there, doing this dance that I probably didn’t want to be doing, and didn’t feel good at the time,” she says. “I know people don’t look at it like that, and it’s this funny thing, but that’s how I used to look at it.”

For those of us who grew up idolizing the 38-year singer and actor, that candor is classic Hilary. As the star of Lizzie McGuire, the Disney sitcom that aired from 2001 to 2004 and turned her into a teen idol, Duff never came across as an untouchable diva. When she started recording music, she sang about awkward moments, first loves, and the drama of finding yourself. She was us, but famous and with a lineup of zany but cute hairstyles.

In late 2025, Duff’s fans were beside themselves when she announced that on February 20, she’d be releasing a new album, luck… or something,, her first since 2015’s Breathe In. Breathe Out. Last month she teased it with four intimate live shows—including the Brooklyn one I attended—and revealed that she’d be launching a world tour, Lucky Me, in 2026. And before you ask: Yes, the set lists will include crowd-pleasers from her 2003 album Metamorphosis and her self-titled 2004 album, as well as several from what she calls her “dancey era,” encompassing singles like “With Love” and (the criminally underrated) “Sparks.”

Sitting across from me now at the Los Angeles studio where she recorded luck… or something, Duff still exudes that mix of ineffable cool and relatability that helped turn her into a generational icon. She’s wearing a green leather Cult Gaia top and pants set and her blonde waves look effortless in the way you hope you might be able to master with a Dyson Airwrap. A sprinkling of minimalist tattoos covers her arms.

Duff’s palpable relatability and everygirl energy has always been her secret sauce. In person she’s relaxed yet focused, clearly a pro at doing interviews but still refreshingly candid. As we swap stories about our kids (we both have preschool-age daughters with big feelings), breastfeeding (it’s hard!), and how we both worried one of our children would get us sick ahead of this interview, it’s hard to believe that I’m sitting with the Hilary Duff. The same woman whose earnest devotion to the butterfly clip helped make it a global trend; who belted “let the raaaaaain fall down” at the top of every episode of MTV’s Laguna Beach; who was a tabloid target no matter what she did or didn’t do.

Even harder to believe: This mom to four young children is choosing this moment to hit the gas on her music career. During the last decade she’s chosen projects that filmed in LA, like the Hulu sitcom How I Met Your Father, which ran for two seasons between 2022 and 2023. In some ways it would probably have been easier to never make music again, because with albums comes touring. But she felt compelled to speak directly to the fans who, like her, were navigating new life stages.

“I just felt really ready to share,” she says. “One, I wanted to stretch creatively, and two, I wanted to make something that I could connect with people again on the level of who I am now. I felt like people have definitely gone through some of the similar large strokes that I have in the past 10 to 15 years.”

The genius hat trick of luck… or something is that it does exactly that: The lyrics delve into a particular type of mid-30s ennui, when you’re happily partnered and settled, but restless and yearning for the messy spontaneity of your youth. “Give me some first times like we still got ’em,” she sings on one track. “I’m worried I’ve felt everything I’m ever going to feel.”

The album’s intimacy is a result of its close-knit production. Duff wrote and produced it nearly exclusively with her husband of six years, Matthew Koma, a songwriter and producer who himself has contributed significantly to millennial culture (he cowrote the inescapable 2012 club banger “Clarity” by Zedd.) And while she never wanted to create a project explicitly about motherhood, the richness of her experience of devoting herself to family was ultimately a wellspring of creativity.

“The things that came out because of being a mother were these feelings of my life being so different or yearning for times that I was wilder, free, or more fun,” she says. “Not that I really want to go back to that time, but sometimes I do.”

Hilary Duff came of age during the unspeakably cruel tabloid reign that defined ’00s pop culture, when the fat-shaming of young women sold magazines, publicly counting down to when young starlets would turn 18 was accepted, and paparazzi regularly waited for young stars to get in and out of cars to apparently see whether they had underwear on. During this ruthless era, famous women were sorted into a stringent binary. Our idols were allowed to either be good girls—militantly wholesome and seemingly virginal—or train wrecks, unmoored and wild, and thus subjected to a litany of bullying and ridicule for their actions.

Hilary Duff was an interesting character in this maelstrom: As a product of the notoriously image-controlling Disney machine, she was painted as a good girl but wasn’t immune to frequent swipes about her changing body, her boyfriends, and her so-called feuds with fellow starlets. She admits now that the fabricated binaries were confusing.

“I’ll say that I didn’t ever feel ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ and it was funny that I was flagged as the good girl because of what people saw me doing on TV or that I wasn’t overtly sexual,” she says. “I was a totally normal teenager doing normal teenager things.”

And while today’s tabloids are far less brutal on young stars, Duff thinks parts of our celebrity gossip culture have gotten worse. Paparazzi might not be doing underwear checks anymore, but entire news cycles can be dominated by an unverified rumor or a TikToker’s speculation on who a blind item—or a viral essay—may or may not be about.

“Everybody didn’t have a platform back then, and now one person can go viral with one thought that they had,” she says, referring to the state of social media in general.

Duff’s response to the intense scrutiny of her youth? To make her circle of trusted people tight.

“I think it’s a very known thing that if a woman is successful, let’s tear her down,” she says. “It’s a very isolating industry.”

Mandy Moore, one of Duff’s fellow ’00s starlets who has also grown into a successful working actor, tells me that although she and Duff were standing next to each other on the cover of Vanity Fair’s now iconic 2003 “It’s Totally Raining Teens” cover, they barely interacted until a chance meeting in 2018. Now the two have forged a close relationship, bonding over their music, their careers, and—as moms—their children. It might sound glamorous, these two pop icons hanging out, but Moore says their friendship is like any other between women trying to raise kids and stay sane.

“I feel exceedingly lucky that my kids happen to spend time with people that I feel like our values are aligned with,” she tells me. “The friends that I’ve made since becoming a parent are some of the deeper, more surprising friendships I’ve found as an adult.”

The sense you get listening to luck…or something is that Duff is firmly in the driver’s seat, which has allowed her to get candid about her personal life.

The lead single, “Mature,” discusses an age-gap relationship and launched a buzzy news cycle of speculation as to who Duff may be singing about. But as she puts it, “if I wanted to say who, I would.”

“It’s definitely about a relationship that I had. It was very brief with someone older than me, and that was not illegal, but inappropriate when you have this much time removed from it,” she says. “Everybody speculates, but I’m not sure they got it right…. I think that it’s super nuanced and it’s hard to defend certain things that have happened in my life. But the one thing that I’ll say is, working as an adult since I was 10 years old, it’s very hard to have relationships with people your own age.”

Another new song, “We Don’t Talk,” seems to address a rift with her older sister, Haylie, describing the breakdown as an “emotional eviction.” On another track, “The Optimist,” she’s singing, “I wish I could sleep on planes, and that my father would really love me.”

When I ask her why she decided to write about her family, she says she saw no alternative. If she’s not willing to be real at this stage in her career, what’s the point?

“That’s my family. Those are the people that affect you the most, take up the most space naturally as a human who’s born into something,” she says. “Just because you’re born into a family doesn’t mean that it always stays together. You can only control your side and your street…. I’ve had a very complicated life, and my parents had a very complicated thing. I know it’s not rare, and I think it goes back to the theme of, Why share now? I guess I just felt ready.”

What she’s focused on, she says, is family. She and Koma have three daughters together—7-year-old Banks, 4-year-old Mae, and 1-year-old Townes—and Duff has a 13-year-old son, Luca, with her ex-husband, Mike Comrie. Choosing to go on tour, therefore, is a loaded decision, one that Duff is still struggling with even though she ultimately knows it’s what she wants. Her kids will see some shows but aren’t touring with her—stops are planned across the US, as well as dates in the UK, Australia, Mexico, and Canada—and she’s working to be okay with choosing to do something for herself.

“It’s a hard battle to fight to be like, Oh, I matter; I’m going to get a workout in. Why is there so much guilt around an hour spent in the day for yourself when you keep everything afloat?” she says. “It’s really so hard. And having a partner that wants what I want and can build me up and support me in the way that he has, I think makes a big difference. But also, your brain has to flip a switch and be like, I’m choosing this for me. I have to do this. My kids are going to be fine.”

Though going on a world tour as a pop star is more glamorous than most day jobs, Duff’s guilt is familiar, and watching her make this choice feels radical. If Hilary Duff can raise four children and make time to create art, maybe it’s okay for us to choose ourselves at times too.

The funny thing about this mom guilt, though, is that while society tells mothers they must continuously sacrifice themselves for their children, it’s said that children themselves are the ones who gain the most from watching their mothers live a full and rich life. As Duff grappled with what going down this path meant for herself as mother, it was her son Luca who provided her validation.

“He came up to me after my LA show, and he was like, ‘I’m really proud of you,’” she says.

“What a rad example to be able to set for our kids,” Koma tells me of his wife. “That you could be there for them in the capacity that she is—of all the things that she is, it’s a mother that she’s best at, and a partner and a family member. So I think it’s really special to see that come to life. She can do that, and she can also follow these passions in a very real and successful way.”

Moore tells me she has looked to her friend for inspiration when attempting to find balance in her own life.

“She’s such an incredible talent and such an incredible mother. Seeing the way that she balances her life is really inspiring to me,” she says. “I think Hilary’s just managed to really find a system that works for her, and I feel like it’s a great template for me [or] for any of us on how to find that delicate balance.”

As I stood in the crowd at Duff’s Brooklyn show, shoulder to shoulder with women my age scream-singing lyrics to songs we memorized as teens, one thought flashed through my mind repeatedly: I needed this.

The stage of life that Duff and so many of her fans are in is one of perpetual sacrifice, of giving yourself so completely to your children, your partner, your family, your job, that it’s easy to lose track of who you are. But that night, I allowed myself to just be me, to turn off my brain and sing about what dreams are made of.

Photographer: Emmanuel Monsalve @emmanuelsmonsalve
Stylist: Carolina Orrico @carolinaorrico
Hair: Barb Thompson @barbdoeshair
Makeup: Kelsey Deenihan @kdeenihan
Nails: Masako Leone
Set Design: Renna Pilar @rennapilar
Production: Petty Cash Production @petty_cash_production
Casting: Background Inc. @bgroundinc
Background talent: Ismael Carbajal, Arleen Condor, Vincenzo Dimino, Amanya Maloba, Janet Shackleton, Uthman Smith, Jasmine Wynn