Gou Getter

In 2019, celebrated South Korean DJ Peggy Gou started a record label, Gudu, and fashion label, Kirin—but for the creative polymath, this is just the beginning

- Rosana Lai

On a hot September evening in 2017 at Stockholm Fashion Week, Sweden’s stylish set was packed into a stifling venue for the closing party where a then-emerging South Korean DJ named Peggy Gou was spinning in a tiny side room. Only 25 years old, in the early days of her career, she was still lugging trunks of CDs around to her club dates—more comfortable with the antiquated medium than the USB flash drives used by her peers—while finding her footing in the techno and house scene. On the main stage, Virgil Abloh, Off-White’s founder and now Louis Vuitton’s menswear artistic director, shared the spotlight with multi-platinum artist Kelis. No one, she was convinced, was going to turn up to listen to her. But one person did, and it was Abloh himself.

“He told me he was a big fan and he wanted to say hi,” says Gou, still with a tone of disbelief. “I was floored.”

They might have been at different points in their careers, but it soon became clear that like many artists of their generation, unbridled ambition and a knack for weaving seamlessly between disciplines were qualities they shared.

“I really liked his attitude,” says Gou. “A friend of his wanted him to design a fitted suitcase for a car, and Virgil’s response was, ‘No, I want to design the car’. And that’s exactly me. That’s what I would say.”