Hilary Duff Pays Tribute to Aaron Carter With Vintage T-Shirt at Philadelphia Concert
Hilary Duff wore a vintage white T-shirt featuring a young Aaron Carter during her Lucky Me World Tour stop in Philadelphia on Sunday night, August 9, 2026.
The shirt bore the image of Carter at the height of his early-2000s teen-pop fame. Duff has been incorporating a different oversized vintage tee into a segment of her Lucky Me Tour shows, according to Bustle, but the Philadelphia choice carried a personal resonance that the others did not.
Duff and Carter were romantically linked from around 2000 to 2003, as Billboard reported. Their relationship played out partly on screen: Carter appeared on Duff's Disney Channel series Lizzie McGuire in 2001, in an episode titled "Aaron Carter's Coming to Town," playing himself. In that episode, Carter and Duff's character share a kiss.
Carter's solo career had already taken off by then. His track "Aaron's Party (Come Get It)" peaked at No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2000 — the flagship singles chart that ranks the most consumed songs in the US each week. He died in November 2022.
Following Carter's death, Duff posted an emotional message on Instagram remembering his "charm." "Boy, did my teenage self love you deeply," she wrote, as reported by Billboard.
More recently, during an April appearance on the Las Culturistas podcast, Duff said a psychic had told her that someone named Aaron had come through during a reading. The psychic identified Aaron Carter as her "childhood boyfriend," Duff recounted, according to Billboard.
For fans who grew up watching Lizzie McGuire and listening to Carter's music in the same era, the Philadelphia T-shirt connected two threads of early-2000s pop culture that were already intertwined — a Disney Channel storyline and a real teenage romance, remembered on a concert stage nearly a quarter-century later.
