If you attend any party this Fashion Week, you’re sure to end up where [insert name of one of three Vogue-approved DJs] will be “spinning.” Here’s an antidote: Girls Girls Girls, a two-DJ team making their first NYFW stop this season. The collective, made up of Louise Chen and Giulietta Canzani (a.k.a. Piu Piu), are known for their club nights in Paris, their festival performances, and the music they self-produce (check out Piu Piu’s recent song ““).
Girls Girls Girls talked to the Cut about their love of R&B and why they won’t end up another NYFW ubiquity.
So what is the Girls Girls Girls collective, exactly?
Louise Chen: It started as a night — like, just a party in Paris. We were a bit frustrated, because there weren’t many hip-hop and R&B nights in Paris and there were times when I just wanted to dance like a slut [laughs]. And I can kind of only really do that to hip-hop and R&B. And then from there we just realized, Wait, maybe we should just do our own night. No one better than us can know what we want to hear, right? So we did one night and I booked Giulietta and that turned into a party. By the end of 2012, we realized it’s always the same crew of girls making the party, whether it’s by their presence or the pictures they take or their graphic-design ideas. We were like, Why don’t we make this official and be a crew all together, instead of just the name of a night? For us, that’s really what brought us together: a passion for music and parties and dancing. From there, essentially the main revenue streams came from DJing. We then became a crew of DJs, and that’s how it evolved over time.
Who makes up the crew?
Giulietta Canzani: Now it’s both of us, me and Louise. We basically do everything from playing out and searching for new music and organizing parties and looking for lineups and doing the artwork and organizing photo shoots and working with brands.
What’s your DJ collective’s manifesto?
G.C.: Basically, what we want to be able to do and what drives us is to have a lot of fun and great music and to be able to join all of our friends in one night. Basically, what’s most important for us is to have fun.
L.C.: It’s a means of expression for us. Girls Girls Girls is our playground. This is where we really enjoy ourselves. It’s where we can express ourselves 100 percent with no strings attached. No one is telling us you should compromise, or whatever. We try to push our own boundaries. We learn a lot from each other and always get curious about something new. Essentially, I guess we’re geeks by day and fun gals by night.
G.C.: We’ve been asked the question about how it is to be a girl DJ and blah blah blah, and the thing is that ultimately it’s not that different. We think about the results differently. We want it to be more about dancing and sometimes more about singing along and stuff like that. But besides that, it’s the same. We are as able as men to throw parties and mix and stuff like that. We’re definitely feminists, that’s implicit, but we don’t want to make it a political thing.
You guys are doing some Fashion Week stuff. I feel like I see the same three DJs at every event. Do you anticipate being one of the ubiquitous fashion-party DJ girls?
L.C.: I think when it comes to girl fashion DJs, it’s often a very local thing. I think it’s kind of the same in Paris. You always have the same DJs who get booked by brands because it’s very much a small world of habits and contacts. It’s more like who’s your favorite girl at the moment. That’s good for them. They found their niche.
G.C.: As far as we’re concerned, we like to play more in clubs than at fashion nights. We do it because it’s fun and we love fashion and we have friends who work in fashion and it’s just a great thing to do. But our main spot is not about fashion; it’s about club music.
If I come to a Girls Girls Girls night, what kind of music will I hear?
G.C.: Whatever music we play, we always look for something that’s really soulful, whether it’s rap, R&B, house, or ghetto tech. Heavy beats. We want everything to have soul in it. Guys would probably say that it’s a very feminine way to look at music. But the way I look at it, it’s definitely what we enjoy and it works quite well. I just love everything that can make you dance like a motherfucker.
L.C.: I really like the vibe that it sets, especially in a warmup set, when you kind of set the tone and you also tell the DJs after, “Oh, you thought you were going to get superhyphy? We’re starting here. We’re starting at the bottom. You’re going to have to take me on a journey.”
G.C.: [Sings] Started from the bottom now we here.
