Miley Cyrus

#1In 2026, 33-year-old Miley Cyrus brought back the blonde hair.

#2It had been 20 years since "Hannah Montana" premiered. The girl who once seemed desperate to put as much distance as possible between herself and that character was now celebrating her openly. In "Younger You," Miley turned toward the child she used to be instead of running from her.

#3That was strange only if you remembered 2013.

#4Back then, Miley had a platinum crop, stuck out her tongue, twerked onstage, sang "We Can't Stop," and appeared to be tearing down almost everything people associated with Hannah Montana.

#5The public treated it like an exorcism.

#6Hannah was gone. Miley had killed her.

#7So why, more than a decade later, would Miley bring her back?

#8Miley grew up around fame. Her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, had exploded into country stardom with "Achy Breaky Heart."

#9But Disney didn't simply hand his daughter a television show.

#10Miley was initially considered too young and too small for "Hannah Montana." She went home, kept sending in tapes, and eventually worked her way back into contention.

#11What the producers saw wasn't a perfectly polished child star. She could be inconsistent. She was young. But when the camera was on her, there was something unusually alive about her.

#12At 13, she became Hannah Montana.

#13The premise was simple: Miley Stewart was an ordinary teenage girl until she put on a blonde wig and became Hannah Montana, a pop superstar nobody realized was the same person.

#14Then fiction and real life started bleeding into each other.

#15Her television dad was her actual dad. Hannah's Aunt Dolly was played by Dolly Parton, who was Miley's real-life godmother. Even the character was named Miley.

#16And before long, Miley Cyrus was living something remarkably close to the show's central problem.

#17She was supposed to be a normal kid.

#18She was also becoming one of the most recognizable teenagers on Earth.

#19"Hannah Montana" was the rocket that launched her.

#20The trouble was that the rocket went very, very high.

#21In 2008, 15-year-old Miley sat for photographer Annie Leibovitz.

#22One image from the Vanity Fair shoot showed her wrapped in a sheet with her bare back exposed.

#23The reaction was immediate.

#24This was a Disney star. A role model for children. How could she take a photograph like that?

#25Disney objected. Adults argued over what the picture meant. And eventually, the teenager at the center of it apologized.

#26Ten years later, Miley took that apology back.

#27As an adult, she said she hadn't understood the image as sexual while making it. She had been trying to understand what everyone expected a "role model" to be, while other people were assigning meaning to her body and image.

#28It was an early glimpse of a problem that would keep following her.

#29Her face.

#30Her hair.

#31Her clothes.

#32Her body.

#33Her behavior.

#34Once she became Hannah Montana, none of those things seemed to belong entirely to Miley anymore.

#35So when did she start trying to take them back?

#36Earlier than most people remember.

#37In 2008, while Miley still wore the long hair audiences associated with Hannah Montana, there was a photograph of Twiggy on the wall of her dressing room.

#38The 1960s model had a famous short crop.

#39Miley pointed to it and said that one day she wanted to cut her hair like that.

#40Four years later, she did.

#41In August 2012, the long hair disappeared. Miley emerged with a short platinum undercut, and the internet reacted as though Hannah Montana had just been declared dead.

#42But Miley described it differently.

#43She said she had never felt more like herself.

#44That matters, because the haircut is easy to flatten into a symbol: Disney girl rebels, chops off hair, destroys old image.

#45Except she had wanted that hair when she was 15.

#46The more interesting thing wasn't that she had rejected something.

#47It was that she had finally chosen the way she wanted to look.

#48A year later, that choice would become much louder.

#49At the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, Miley walked onto the stage to perform "We Can't Stop."

#50Then Robin Thicke joined her.

#51The teddy bears.

#52The tongue.

#53The flesh-colored outfit.

#54The twerking.

#55The foam finger.

#56By the next morning, almost everyone seemed to have an opinion.

#57It wasn't simply an accidental performance that spun out of control. It had been rehearsed. Miley knew she was doing something people would remember.

#58The backlash was enormous.

#59She kept going.

#60"Wrecking Ball" followed. Then "Bangerz." To people who still carried an image of Hannah Montana in their heads, Miley seemed almost deliberately unrecognizable.

#61Her private life was changing at the same time.

#62Miley had met Liam Hemsworth while filming "The Last Song." They became engaged, but in 2013 that engagement ended.

#63From the outside, this era looked like pure freedom.

#64But when Miley later reflected on what had actually changed most inside her, it wasn't the haircut or the VMAs.

#65It was that being alone didn't scare her as much anymore.

#66She began to understand how young she had been when she got engaged. She didn't want to need another person in order to feel like herself.

#67The woman who looked wildly free in public was still learning how to be free in private.

#68And that lesson wasn't finished.

#69Liam came back.

#70Then there was the house.

#71While Miley and Liam were apart, Liam bought a house in Malibu.

#72He didn't know its history.

#73The previous owner was producer Matthew Wilder, and years earlier, a young Miley had worked on music there — not as Hannah Montana, but under her own name.

#74When Liam bought the property, traces of Miley's earlier career were still there.

#75He had accidentally purchased a house connected to the musical life of his ex-fiancée.

#76Eventually, Miley and Liam got back together.

#77Miley moved into the house too.

#78A place where a younger Miley had once worked on becoming an artist in her own right became the home she shared with Liam.

#79Then, in November 2018, it disappeared.

#80The Woolsey Fire tore through Malibu.

#81Miley wasn't in California. She was in South Africa filming "Black Mirror."

#82Liam evacuated their animals.

#83The house burned down.

#84Photographs.

#85Artwork.

#86Songs.

#87Handwritten lyrics.

#88Computers and hard drives.

#89Years of objects and memories were suddenly gone.

#90And Miley was on a set.

#91The scene she had to film involved her character suffering a panic attack in a house in Malibu.

#92Her real house in Malibu was burning.

#93She finished the work.

#94After learning what had happened, Miley began writing down what she was feeling. There was anger and grief, but not only grief. She also described a strange sense of relief, as though heavy weights had been cut from her ankles and she could rise toward the surface.

#95But losing a life doesn't make you instantly free of it.

#96Miley lost her home and held more tightly to the person who remained.

#97Liam.

#98Miley later described what happened between herself and Liam after the fire as a kind of glue.

#99They had lived through something that only the two of them could completely understand.

#100In December 2018, they married.

#101The house had been gone for barely more than a month.

#102Around that time, Miley described Liam as her home.

#103Years later, she would look at the marriage with more complexity. It wasn't that the love hadn't been real. They had loved each other for years.

#104But there had also been trauma, and a desire to rebuild something quickly after so much had vanished.

#105The fire pulled them closer.

#106It didn't burn away everything that had been difficult between them.

#107The marriage ended within months.

#108And when Miley realized it was ending, she did something familiar.

#109She went to work.

#110June 30, 2019.

#111Glastonbury.

#112Miley would later say that this was the day she decided her relationship with Liam no longer worked for her.

#113Then she walked onto the stage.

#114She performed for a massive crowd.

#115Years later, while revisiting her own past, Miley noticed that this wasn't an isolated moment.

#116Her grandfather died.

#117She finished the scene.

#118Her Malibu house burned.

#119She finished the shoot.

#120Her marriage ended.

#121She did the show.

#122Work.

#123Performance.

#124Character.

#125Again and again, those came before the human being underneath them.

#126That's where the Hannah Montana problem becomes more interesting.

#127Miley had already taken off the blonde wig years earlier.

#128She had already changed the music, the clothes, the hair, the image.

#129But she was still capable of putting performance before herself.

#130Escaping Hannah hadn't automatically taught her how to stop performing.

#131Eventually, Miley described a new rule for her life.

#132The human comes first.

#133And around the same period, something happened that forced a lifelong performer into a form of silence.

#134Her voice stopped.

#135In 2019, Miley underwent vocal surgery.

#136Afterward, she had to spend weeks without speaking.

#137A person who had spent most of her life singing, acting, interviewing, performing, and filling rooms with her voice suddenly had to communicate through a whiteboard.

#138Around this period, she also stopped drinking and using drugs.

#139There wasn't one neat cause.

#140Her health mattered. Protecting her voice mattered. She was thinking about age and mortality. And she had begun looking backward into her family history — addiction, mental health, abandonment, divorce, patterns that existed long before she did.

#141The question she started asking was simple:

#142Why am I the way I am?

#143There wasn't a clean recovery montage after that.

#144In 2020, she acknowledged that she had started drinking again.

#145But she also changed the way she talked about that kind of setback. Instead of treating the imperfect version of herself as someone to hate, she tried to become curious about her.

#146And eventually, that same curiosity reached someone she had known for nearly her whole life.

#147Hannah Montana.

#148On March 24, 2021, the 15th anniversary of "Hannah Montana," 28-year-old Miley wrote a letter.

#149It was addressed to Hannah.

#150She wrote that there had been a time when Hannah seemed to hold more of her identity than Miley herself did.

#151But Hannah had also been a rocket.

#152That character had taken her somewhere almost unimaginable.

#153At the end, Miley wrote:

#154"I love you Hannah Montana. Forever, Miley."

#155It wasn't an announcement that she wanted to become Hannah again.

#156It was something more difficult.

#157She could acknowledge what Hannah had given her without disappearing back inside her.

#158And soon, another old fear returned in a different form.

#159Being alone.

#160In 2023, Miley released "Flowers."

#161She sang about buying herself flowers, taking herself dancing, holding her own hand.

#162People immediately connected the song to Liam.

#163But reducing it to an ex-husband revenge anthem misses the more interesting part.

#164In 2013, Miley had talked about overcoming her fear of being alone.

#165Ten years later, she was singing that she could give herself the things she once looked for from somebody else.

#166That sounds like a perfect ending.

#167It wasn't.

#168The original version of "Flowers" was sadder. Miley had first imagined a narrator who could do all those independent things and still wasn't sure she could love herself better than the other person had.

#169She rewrote it.

#170Later, she admitted that some of the finished song's confidence contained an element of "fake it till you make it."

#171That makes the song more revealing, not less.

#172"Flowers" wasn't necessarily proof that the work was finished.

#173It could also be the work itself.

#174Say the words.

#175Practice becoming the person who believes them.

#176The song became one of the biggest hits of Miley's career.

#177And it brought her an achievement that, strangely, she had never had before.

#178At the 2024 Grammy Awards, "Flowers" earned Miley the first Grammy wins of her life.

#179She had been globally famous since she was a teenager.

#180She had sold records, filled arenas, generated scandals, reinvented herself again and again.

#181But this was her first Grammy.

#182She won two that night.

#183And yet Miley resisted treating the award as the moment that finally made her life legitimate.

#184Her life had already been beautiful before the trophy, she said. She hoped the award wouldn't change that.

#185Placed beside the earlier parts of her life, that lands differently.

#186This was someone who had once finished work while her house burned.

#187Someone who had performed on the day she decided her marriage was over.

#188Now one of the industry's biggest symbols of success was in her hands, and she didn't want it to become bigger than the life holding it.

#189That same year, another piece of her past returned.

#190Disney named her its youngest-ever Disney Legend.

#191Onstage, Miley talked about Hannah as the beginning.

#192The beginning of so much of what she became.

#193Hannah, she said, was still part of her.

#194By this point, the old question starts to feel wrong.

#195Which was the real Miley?

#196Hannah?

#197The woman from "Bangerz"?

#198The person who clung to Liam after losing her home?

#199The person who left that marriage?

#200The sober Miley?

#201The Miley who drank again?

#202The Miley who sang that she could love herself better?

#203They look contradictory if you expect one of them to expose all the others as fake.

#204But what if they were all true while she was living them?

#205While making "Something Beautiful" in 2025, Miley looked back across the eras of her career. For years, all those previous versions had seemed to blur together like noise.

#206Now she could separate them.

#207See each album.

#208Each performance.

#209Each era.

#210Each version of herself.

#211And love them again on their own terms.

#212Maybe the problem was never that Miley kept changing.

#213Maybe the problem was feeling that every new Miley had to prove the old one had been false.

#214Then, in 2026, that shift became visible in the most obvious symbol possible.

#215The blonde hair returned.

#216For the 20th anniversary of "Hannah Montana," Miley brought that world back herself.

#217She released "Younger You," turning toward the child she had been. She revisited the blonde.

#218But something had changed since she was 13.

#219Miley could now say that she had spent years making the name "Miley" recognizable in its own right.

#220She didn't have to become Hannah completely.

#221She could borrow the blonde, borrow the visual language, step into that history, and still remain unmistakably Miley.

#222The wig looked familiar.

#223The ownership didn't.

#224Then, a few months later, another part of the name began disappearing.

#225Cyrus.

#226In late summer 2026, as she prepared the new album "Bass Persuades," her professional branding increasingly appeared simply as:

#227Miley.

#228There is no solid reason to treat that as a rejection of her father. It isn't evidence of a legal name change either.

#229It's a professional name for a new era.

#230But names have always mattered in Miley's story.

#231She was born Destiny Hope Cyrus.

#232A childhood nickname, "Smiley," became Miley.

#233Then the world knew her as Hannah Montana.

#234Then Miley Cyrus.

#235And now, professionally:

#236Miley.

#237There was the Miley with the short platinum hair.

#238The Miley of "Bangerz."

#239The Miley whose house burned down.

#240The Miley who couldn't speak.

#241The Miley of "Flowers."

#242The Miley who put Hannah's blonde hair back on at 33.

#243And as another musical era began in 2026, the screen held only one name.

#244Miley.

#245Not because all the earlier versions had finally been erased.

#246Because the name had become large enough to hold them.

#247While Miley spent years wrestling with the difference between a persona and a self, one of the closest adults in her life offered a completely different model.

#248Her godmother, Dolly Parton, spent decades in towering blonde hair, rhinestones, makeup, and an instantly recognizable public persona — yet somehow rarely seemed trapped by it.

#249Miley once observed that Dolly has a remarkable way of letting everyone feel invited into her world while never actually giving the public unrestricted access to her private self.

#250For young Miley, a blonde persona eventually became something she needed to escape.

#251So how did Dolly spend a lifetime inside an even bigger one without letting it own her?