Hannah Montana was always architecturally deliberate about identity and performance. This article revisits that construction through a personal lens, and through Miley Cyrus’s own evolution: from managing Hannah as a necessary double life, to inhabiting her as something closer to drag — expansive, empowering, and entirely on her own terms.
By Ravgun Kaur
Picture: Via Pixabay, CC0
I remember wearing these bright pink tights and a geometrically block studded skirt to school for my birthday in 4th grade — my Hannah Montana inspired outfit. It started out great, and I got lots of compliments. But then I came home feeling like I didn’t relate to Hannah a whole lot, in fact Miley felt more like ›me‹. And it made perfect sense that as a school-going kid — a normal teenager on the screen was quite obviously going to feel more personally parallel than a famous superstar. Yet, back then I still found it confusing as to why I was leaning one way when both personas where essentially the same person at their core. I filed it away as one of those inexplicable childhood feelings and never questioned it; until the Hannah Montana 20th Anniversary Special this year made me question everything all over again.
On Growing Up With Miley Cyrus
In the recent 20th Anniversary special, Miley Cyrus herself talked about how she’s always had more of a »Miley personality«, but that she’s now genuinely enjoying the »Hannah alter-ego« too. Hearing this was oddly validating, as it confirmed something I’d sensed as a child but never had the words to express: these were always two distinct identities, even though they are the same girl with and without a wig.
Or Should I Say, Growing Up With Hannah Montana?
Hannah was a performative pop star who embodied an almost unattainable lifestyle. However, the show’s genius lay in using Hannah’s existence to make Miley’s ordinary life appear equally (if not more) valuable by contrast. The show was always played with the boundary between fame and normalcy, and while Hannah was the spectacle that kept viewers watching, Miley’s ›ordinary‹ world was consistently framed as something worth protecting. She led this double life, always scared of losing either side, but the side she fought hardest to keep wasn’t the famous one. She didn’t want to be treated differently, even if that meant giving up special treatment. This tension — someone with access to an extraordinary life actively choosing the ordinary one — was the underlying theme running through the whole show.
And this is why it was so validating to look up to Miley back then — because the show assigned so much value to Miley’s ›normalcy‹, it made a normal teenager like me allot the same sort of importance to my own day-to-day life.
This ›value to normalcy‹ is made most explicit in The Hannah Montana Movie. At the beginning, Miley becomes increasingly obsessed with her fame. She wants to star in a movie, she wants to be Hannah full time, she wants that life more than anything. Then her dad tricks her into a visit to their hometown under the guise of taking her to New York. Her getting off a private jet, striking a pose and saying »Hello, New York!« only to be greeted by a moo-ing cow is the perfect foreshadowing to the contrast between Hannah and Miley’s aesthetic. The rest of the film is about her reconnecting with her roots, her community and the person she was before she started wearing the wig. The movie’s entire arc essentially states the show’s argument plainly: an ordinary life is not something to escape. It’s something to come home to.
Childhood Me Was Onto Something
Looking back, it is now easy to tell that the distinction between Miley and Hannah was not just something I cooked up in my head — but rather it was intentional on the makers’ part, and also constantly reinforced through the distinct wardrobe, aesthetic, and music explicitly assigned to both the personas. It is really impressive how deliberate the storytelling was — even the smaller details that you absorbed as a child without fully understanding why they had the effect that they did.
Consider the music. The songs released under each identity had a strikingly different feel. From the movie alone, The Climb and Hoedown Throwdown, both carrying Miley’s fingerprints, one was about self-discovery, while the other was rooted in country instruments that reflect her Tennessee roots. This was in stark contrast to Let’s Get Crazy, a song from the same movie which was essentially about being famous and having a good time. The difference in message and composition associated with each constructed persona becomes clear. The stylistic differences were dramatic enough in themselves, but what really got me was that even when you Google these songs today, they appear under different artist names. The Climb comes up under Miley Cyrus. Let’s Get Crazy comes up under Hannah Montana. As a grown up, I can see that this is really just a testament to Miley Cyrus’s versatility as an artist. But as a child, this detail quietly reinforced the idea that these were two separate creative worlds, which was exactly the point.
Now, let’s discuss the wardrobe. Miley Stewart’s outfits revolved around mostly uniform muted colours with soft contrasts between the pieces. Her outfits were paired with lots of cardigans (symbolic of a regular person) along with either none or very subtle floral patterns — the focus being on cute, and yet very muted to avoid making her stand out. While Hannah’s wardrobe consisted of a lot of prints and patterns, be it leopard prints or polka dots or colour blocking. There would usually be one statement piece — like a denim sequined jacket, or an accentuated accessory like a thick belt, necklace or a headband in a bright colour — basically stand-out pieces screaming of showmanship, the exact opposite of Miley Stewart’s girl-next-door aesthetic. And let’s not forget — lots of glitter for anything Hannah related.
The difference was so stark that in real life it took Miley Cyrus herself years to resolve internal conflict about the characters and arrive at the idea of coexistence.
When Miley Cyrus Left Hannah (and also Miley Stewart) Behind
The kind of turbulence that followed Miley Cyrus’ release of Can’t Be Tamed was something I wasn’t prepared for. It wasn’t the music itself that caused it, but the world’s reaction to it. There was this collective discomfort, people felt personally betrayed that she wasn’t staying in the lane that the show had built for her. I remember being caught in the middle of it all, enjoying the musical and personal transformation of the artist I idealised, yet unsettled by the outside noise telling me that I shouldn’t accept the change. It was almost like the public was uncomfortable about the reality of watching someone grow up and claim their own identity, when we had been accustomed to the certain on-screen version of that person that we had been fed over the years. And it especially didn’t make it easier that the on-screen Miley Stewart shared the same name with Miley Cyrus.
Then came the Bangerz album era in 2013, followed by the big chop. And I think that the drastic haircut was the most empowering and deliberately bold move of Miley Cyrus’ career, not because of the shock value, but because of the message it conveyed beneath the surface. At present, it might be hard to grasp how it was a big deal when we are accustomed to every celebrity experimenting with their looks, but back then a simple haircut on her was almost like a scandal. I feel like the reaction came from a mix of unfulfilled expectations from a child star who grew up in public limelight, and patriarchal expectations from women in general to conform to a certain archetype laid out for them.
Flashbacks
In the series, we return to the books, films, series, music albums and games of our childhood and youth. What was our view of these things back then? And how has this view changed after years of academic studies? Reflecting personally as well as scientifically on such questions, we perceive not only the objects of our enquiry in a new way, but we also recognize the long road we traveled since our first encouter with them.
The texts are published at irregular intervals and can be found here.
Both Miley Stewart and Hannah Montana’s identity was tied to the ›hair‹, so by chopping it off, Miley Cyrus took the discomfort that people had with her evolution and magnified it a thousand times, making the underlying message impossible to ignore: This is my life, and it will not be shaped by your expectations of me. Remarkably, she did this at the peak of her fame, when she could have simply conformed and kept riding the wave. She didn’t have to blow it up. Yet she chose to. And in doing so, she embodied the very lesson that the show had been teaching for years — that your own identity is worth more than a version of you that keeps everyone else comfortably entertained.
The woman she is today makes it genuinely impossible to look back and wish she’d made any other choice.
A Full Circle Moment
All of this is precisely why the Anniversary Special had a different impact on me than I expected.
Seeing her walk back onto the old set with her signature Hannah hairdo and rocking 2000s capri pants (which I did not think would be possible to pull off in 2026, and yet they were), and hear her say »Home sweet home« — It was a full-circle moment that felt genuinely earned, and not just nostalgic for nostalgia’s sake. Because she wasn’t returning to Hannah out of retreat or defeat. She looked comfortable in a way she couldn’t have ten years ago, and I feel like she was at ease playing a different persona precisely because her own identity i.e. that of Miley Cyrus is now so much bigger and more settled. When your sense of self isn’t under threat, you can enjoy a role without being consumed by it.
She even mentioned that most of the hair in the wig is real, not a replacement for it. It feels almost too on-the-nose as a metaphor, but there it is.
The most sentimental moment for me was when she talked about how her mother would always choose »Miley« — even if it meant losing everything that came with Hannah. I think that moment quietly explains why the show resonated so deeply with me as a child. Because, at its heart, it wasn’t really a show about fame. It was a show about how valuable the person underneath the performance is — and how easy it is to forget that, and how important it is not to.
And most importantly, what makes the Anniversary Special feel like something more than nostalgia is how completely Miley’s relationship with the character seems to have transformed. There is so much that genuinely feels healing about seeing her at peace with the alter ego. My inner child who was always quietly defensive about Miley being overshadowed by her own persona finds great comfort in this. Miley herself seems to be approaching it with gratitude rather than resentment — she talks about the opportunities it brought her, and especially the funny little anecdote about taking pride in having a permanently reserved parking spot at Disneyland because of being recognised as a Disney legend — that reveals everything you need to know about where she’s landed emotionally with all of it.
In addition, what strikes most accurately in terms of a clear reflection of her current relationship with playing Hannah as a persona, is something she said on Jimmy Kimmel last year — that Hannah Montana was essentially »the most famous drag queen for kids.« And I think that reframe explains exactly why her current approach to the character feels so liberating, and downright fun. She’s not slipping back into an old skin. Hannah is now fabulous, over-the-top, funky in the most deliberately performative way — a persona worn with the kind of confidence and theatricality that drag has always celebrated. The whole thing radiates a genuine queer joy: the pleasure of embodying a character loudly and freely, with nothing to lose and everything to play with. There is something deeply empowering about watching someone return to a role that once felt like a cage and transform it into a stage.
That shift changes everything. Because when someone indulges a character from a place of security rather than necessity, the performance itself becomes an act of self-expression rather than self-erasure. She’s not losing anything by stepping into the wig. If anything, she’s gaining — expanding, not retreating.
Perhaps returning to Hannah at this stage isn’t nostalgia at all. It’s reclamation — the best of both worlds, on her terms this time. Not the show’s, the audience’s, or the industry’s. Hers. And I just hope that, as a society, we can keep up — push ourselves out of the mental boxes we build around the artists we love and allow them to pave their own path. Even when it surprises us. Especially then.
