We All Love Gigi Now

thank you, tiktok

In the past few days, my TikTok algorithm has been serving me videos of the Gigi Club in Wuhan, China. The content seems to be mirrored from the Chinese social media site Doyin and ranges from videos of the dancers performing and interacting with audience members to a dancer live-streaming a chat with her fans while getting her hair and makeup done for the show. The main dancer is perhaps Gigi herself? The descriptions on these videos seem to be written in Vietnamese as well as Chinese, neither of which I speak (sadly), and Google translate is a nightmare. If anyone knows the main dancer’s name—or if she’d prefer to remain anonymous—please let me know in the comments.

The distinctive qualities of the Gigi Club’s main dancer is that she is wearing hanfu and performs sensually for an audience of women. Hanfu clothing can be compared to Renaissance Fair cosplay in the US, but hanfu is much cooler and more diverse; it spans a longer period of time, overlapping with the English Renaissance. Hanfu includes clothing from the Han people (and other ethnic groups) from c. 200 B.C.E. to 1644 A.C.E. A more inclusive term is huafu, which includes all of the ethnic groups, but the term that is popular at this time is hanfu.

At the Gigi Club, the dancer wears silky, flowing skirts and sleeves: an open robe layered over a dress or top and skirt. She seems to wear versions of Song Dynasty hanfu. To my American eye, her long flowing skirts look like some of the skirts I’ve worn for lyrical dance, belly dance, and even pole dance. Mine are made of chiffon, but hers might be made of silk, as they look nicer than mine, and traditional hanfu are made from silk gauze. The long skirts make for dramatic moments where she does vertical splits up on a wall beside a woman.

Her split is emphasized by the outfit; the fabric falls dramatically away from her leg, fluttering around the audience member’s body as well her body. Her leg emerging from a cocoon of clothing is more sensual than doing vertical splits with shorts. And the juxtaposition of the traditional clothing with sapphic interactions is absolutely mesmerizing. I fell hard and deep into the Gigi Club rabbit hole on TikTok. When I first saw the Gigi dancer put the stick of a lollipop in her mouth and then put the lollipop end in another woman’s mouth, I melted. This was not only due to the sexy nature of the movement, it was also because the female audience member was delicate and respectful in response to this sexy movement. Perhaps flustered is a more precise word for her emotions (and mine).

I want to be near the dancer and be the dancer. I love vertical splits and splits in skirts, as seen in the photo and video below:

And I have a long love of watching dance performances, getting lap dances at clubs, and attending dance parties. Not hanfu long, but crossing a millennium long. TikTok has been great not only for its mastery of the infinite scroll, but also for my voyeurism. There are other western sapphic dancers I follow there, but I can also find these dancers on Instagram. I don’t know when, or if, the Gigi Club will make it to the ‘gram (it’s not in my Reels yet, certainly). TikTok exposes me to more diverse dancing from a part of the world that I would love to visit, but probably can’t ever afford to. I know I got on the Gigi side of the algorithm because I also follow several hanfu artists, including one who goes to Ren Fairs and wows everyone wearing English Renaissance cosplay. A video about the Gigi phenomenon was posted a few weeks ago on YouTube, a little before my algorithm decided to make me love Gigi, but this video didn’t end up in my YT suggestions; I had to search for it. To be fair, I don’t spend nearly as much time scrolling YT shorts, nor following creators on YT, as I do on TikTok.

However, I still wonder if I would have seen Gigi at all if I weren’t on TikTok. I hope we don’t lose this platform that is filled with inspiring dance in distant places that many of us won’t ever get to see in person.