Peggy Gou's Real Name: The Kim Min-ji Behind the K-House

Peggy Gou's real name is Kim Min-ji (김민지), a South Korean DJ, producer and singer born in Incheon on 3 July 1991. She is 35, based in Berlin, and makes house music, the sound she has claimed as her own "K-house," rooted in 1990s house and sung in both Korean and English. That is the short answer, and it is the one most people arrive looking for. The longer story is more interesting: a fashion editor who left a Harper's Bazaar office in London, taught herself to produce, and turned a Korean-language house record into a global calling card, a UK Top 10 single and a debut album that argued house music could carry a Korean identity without asking permission. This is a working DJ and producer's guide to who Peggy Gou actually is, what she has released, who puts it out, and where she sat in the club world through the summer of 2026.

Peggy Gou at a glance

• Real name: Kim Min-ji (Korean: 김민지; Revised Romanization "Gim Minji"). "Peggy Gou" is the stage name.
• Born: 3 July 1991 in Incheon, South Korea. She is 35 as of August 2026.
• Based: Berlin, Germany. She lived in London as a teenager and studied fashion there; London is often described as a "second home," not a formal base.
• Role: DJ, singer, songwriter and record producer.
• Breakout track: "It Makes You Forget (Itgehane)," released on the "Once" EP via Ninja Tune on 2 March 2018, the first time she sang in Korean.
• Biggest hit: "(It Goes Like) Nanana" (2023), which reached No. 5 on the UK Official Singles Chart, her first UK Top 10.
• Debut album: "I Hear You," ten tracks, released 7 June 2024 on XL Recordings.
• Her label: Gudu Records, founded March 2019. "Gudu" means "shoes" in Korean. She also runs a fashion label, KIRIN, launched the same year.
• Awards: "Independent Track of the Year" at the 2018 AIM Independent Music Awards; first Korean artist nominated in the International Song category at the 2024 BRIT Awards.
• Fashion: Louis Vuitton (Autumn/Winter 2020 campaign), Nike (Air Max 270), plus ties to Bulgari, Maybelline and TAG Heuer, and a place in the BoF 500.
• 2026 UK show: headlined "Labyrinth on the Thames" at the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, London on 2 August 2026, her only UK date of the year.

What is Peggy Gou's real name?

Peggy Gou's real name is Kim Min-ji, written in Korean as 김민지 and romanised as "Gim Minji" under the Revised Romanization system. "Peggy Gou" is a stage name, the professional identity under which she DJs, produces and sings. She is a South Korean artist, born in the port city of Incheon. The name confusion is entirely ordinary in dance music, where a chosen alias is the norm rather than the exception, and the pattern of a stage name masking a very different birth name is one we keep coming back to, from another electronic star's real name to Mall Grab's real name and lo-fi house.

What makes Kim Min-ji's case different is that she has made her Korean identity central to the music rather than tucking it behind the alias, singing in Korean, naming her label with a Korean word, and building an entire album around what it means to be a Korean woman making house music. The name on the passport and the name on the record sleeve are, in her telling, part of the same argument.

How old is Peggy Gou and where is she from?

Peggy Gou was born on 3 July 1991, which makes her 35 as of August 2026. She was born in Incheon, South Korea, the large port city just west of Seoul. Her route into music was anything but direct. As a teenager she moved to London, where she began her adult life and studied fashion at the London College of Fashion, and she is now based in Berlin. It is worth being precise here, because a lot of profiles blur it: she is Berlin-based, and London, for all its importance to her story, is a place she and her promoters describe as a "second home" rather than an official residence. Those three cities map onto three chapters: Korea is the roots and the mother tongue, London is where she discovered clubbing and fashion, and Berlin is where the DJ career hardened into something professional. The sound she landed on draws on all three.

From Harper's Bazaar to the booth: the fashion-to-DJ path

Before she was a DJ, Peggy Gou worked in fashion media. After studying at the London College of Fashion, she was the London correspondent and editor for Harper's Bazaar Korea, a job that placed her at the centre of the industry she would later trade on. That background is not a footnote. It explains why she moves through the worlds of Louis Vuitton and Nike as comfortably as she does through a club booth: she came up understanding image as a professional discipline, not an afterthought bolted onto the music.

That said, the fashion polish has sometimes led people to underrate the graft behind the DJ career. She taught herself to produce, cut her teeth in Berlin, and put in the unglamorous hours of learning arrangement and sound design before any of the campaigns came calling. It is a useful case study in how image and music can reinforce each other without one hollowing out the other, a balance we have written about before in the context of when image and persona come before the music. With Peggy Gou the records came first and the fashion world came to her. We will come back to that story in full. First, the record that actually broke her.

"It Makes You Forget" and the sound that broke her

The track that turned Peggy Gou from a respected working DJ into an international name was "It Makes You Forget (Itgehane)," released on the "Once" EP through Ninja Tune on 2 March 2018. It is a warm, rolling, deep house record with a hypnotic groove, and its defining feature is her own voice, singing in Korean for the first time on a release. That choice, to use her mother tongue rather than default to English, was the hook that made the record feel like nobody else's: recognisably house, built for the floor, but carrying an identity that travelled precisely because it refused to blend in.

The industry noticed. "It Makes You Forget (Itgehane)" won "Independent Track of the Year" at the 2018 AIM Independent Music Awards, and the record became a fixture in DJ sets far beyond her own. It is the template for everything that followed: house music with a Korean voice, made by someone who understood both the dancefloor and the pop instinct well enough to sit them side by side. If you want to place the sound in a lineage, it belongs to the 90s house revival that shaped I Hear You, the deep, groove-led, vocal-friendly strain of house that her later album would make its whole subject. Around it she released through respected homes, from earlier EPs on Ninja Tune and Phonica to a DJ-Kicks compilation on !K7 Music, the underground grounding that later coverage tends to skip over in its rush to the chart hits.

Gudu Records vs XL Recordings: who releases what

Here is the distinction that almost every profile gets muddled, and it matters for understanding how her career is structured. Gudu Records and XL Recordings are two different things, and they are not interchangeable.

• Gudu Records: Peggy Gou's own label, which she founded in March 2019. The name comes from the Korean word "gudu," meaning "shoes." It is her platform, the vehicle for her own releases and for artists she champions, and it is entirely hers.
• XL Recordings: the major-indie label, home to the likes of Adele and Radiohead over the years, that released her debut studio album "I Hear You" in 2024. XL is not her label. It is the partner she chose to put out the album.

Founding your own label and then releasing your biggest work through someone else's looks, on paper, like a contradiction. It is not. Running Gudu gives her creative control and a home for the club-facing side of her output; partnering with XL for "I Hear You" gave the album the reach and distribution of an established major-indie, the kind of infrastructure a debut by a crossover star needs. Getting the distinction right tells you she has thought carefully about which parts of her career to own outright and which to scale, in a climate where owning your own platform is one of the few levers an artist genuinely holds, a tension that runs through bigger questions about house music and the cost of clubbing in 2026.

"(It Goes Like) Nanana" and the 2023 chart record

If "It Makes You Forget" broke her to the clubs, "(It Goes Like) Nanana" broke her to everyone else. Released in 2023, this bright, euphoric, pop-facing house record did what very few club records manage: it crossed fully into the mainstream singles chart without losing the dancefloor. It peaked at No. 5 on the UK Official Singles Chart in July 2023, her first UK Top 10, and also reached No. 3 in Ireland, No. 19 in France, No. 32 in Australia and No. 39 in Germany. And it landed inside one of the more remarkable chart weeks in recent British pop history. On 18 August 2023, with "Nanana" at No. 5, the entire UK Top 6 was made up of female solo artists for the first time in the chart's roughly 70-year history, with Peggy Gou alongside Billie Eilish, Dua Lipa, Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift. For a Korean house producer to be in that company was its own kind of statement.

The recognition followed. At the 2024 BRIT Awards, she became the first Korean artist ever nominated in the International Song category, for "Nanana." Whatever house purists make of its pop sheen, the track turned a name known to clubbers into a name known to the general public, and it did so without her stepping away from house music as the vehicle.

"I Hear You" (2024): 90s house, Korean identity, Lenny Kravitz

Peggy Gou's debut studio album, "I Hear You," was released on 7 June 2024 through XL Recordings. Ten tracks long, it is built explicitly around 1990s house music, filtered through her own voice and identity. This is the record where the thesis implicit since "It Makes You Forget" becomes the whole point: house music as a vehicle for a Korean woman's identity, sung in Korean and English, drawing on the warmth of classic 90s house rather than the harder strains that dominate a lot of contemporary club culture.

The album houses her two biggest calling cards. "(It Goes Like) Nanana" is on it, and it features "I Believe in Love Again," a collaboration with Lenny Kravitz that reaches for a widescreen, festival-sized version of her sound. A bonus-tracks edition followed on 26 September 2024. As a debut it is unusually assured, precisely because she was not a debutant in any real sense: she had years of EPs, remixes and DJ sets behind her, and the album reads as a distillation of a sound she had already spent half a decade refining.

The cultural argument underneath the record is the part most profiles skip, and it is the most interesting thing about her. She has been vocal about the idea of "K-house," Korean house music, as something she embodies rather than merely participates in. In coverage around the album, including in the South China Morning Post, she framed the term as one coined for her because there was, in her telling, no meaningful Korean house scene ahead of her to belong to. Whether or not you accept the claim wholesale, it is what separates "I Hear You" from being just a collection of well-made house tracks. It is house music making a point about who gets to make it and in what language.

Musically, it plants her firmly in the ongoing 90s house revival that runs through the work of a lot of her peers. She sits in a wider cluster of house-focused artists we have profiled, from another house DJ's real name explained to Ewan McVicar's real name and Scottish house rise. What sets Peggy Gou apart within that group is the pop reach and the fashion platform, which push her audience far beyond the usual house crowd.

Peggy Gou and fashion: Louis Vuitton, Nike, KIRIN and Virgil Abloh

Few DJs move through the fashion world the way Peggy Gou does, and this is where the Harper's Bazaar background pays off. Her fashion CV is a sustained presence at the top of the industry, not a one-off campaign.

• Louis Vuitton: she modelled shoes in the house's Autumn/Winter 2020 campaign, a repeat appearance for one of the most prestigious names in luxury fashion.
• Nike: she featured in the Air Max 270 "Just Go Bigger" campaign, tying her to one of the sportswear giant's flagship silhouettes.
• KIRIN: her own fashion label, launched in 2019, backed by New Guards Group, the operator behind Off-White, and developed with the support of the late Virgil Abloh.
• Wider brand ties: she has worked with Bulgari, Maybelline and TAG Heuer, spanning jewellery, cosmetics and watches.
• Industry recognition: she is a listed member of the BoF 500, Business of Fashion's index of the people shaping the global fashion industry.

The Virgil Abloh connection is the one to dwell on. Abloh, who died in 2021, was among the most influential figures in twenty-first-century fashion, the artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear and the founder of Off-White, and his backing of KIRIN placed Peggy Gou inside the same creative conversation as the designers reshaping luxury while she was still, first and foremost, a house DJ. That dual standing is genuinely rare. Most DJs who cross into fashion do so as guests; Peggy Gou crossed into it as a professional who had worked in the industry, and brought her own label to the table. The fashion is not a distraction from the music but a parallel career sharing the same instinct for identity, image and control.

Peggy Gou in 2026: the Greenwich show and the festival run

Through 2026 Peggy Gou remained one of the most in-demand names on the international festival and club circuit, and for UK audiences the headline event came early in August. She headlined "Labyrinth on the Thames," billed in some quarters as "Peggy Gou on the Thames," at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, London, on 2 August 2026, her only UK date of the year. The college is a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the banks of the Thames, and an open-air riverside show in that architecture is about as far from a dark basement club as house music gets while still being unmistakably a rave.

The line-up around her was strong, with Prospa, MPH, Kelly Lee Owens and Daisybelle all on the bill. For a London reader, the Greenwich show is the anchor of her 2026, a rare chance to see her in the city she once called home, and it belongs to the same conversation as where to hear house in London, even as the venues have grown from clubs to World Heritage riverfronts.

Beyond London, her 2026 was a full festival year. European dates included Primavera Sound in Barcelona on 6 June and its Porto edition on 14 June, Kappa FuturFestival in Turin on 5 July, and Sziget in Budapest on 14 August, keeping her in the news cycle right through the summer. In North America she played the M3F Festival in Phoenix over 6 and 7 March and Under the K Bridge Park in Brooklyn on 9 May. That spread, from Arizona to Budapest by way of Greenwich, is the itinerary of an artist at the very top of the circuit, and it is why her name stays in constant search demand whether or not she has new music out. She sits at the headline end of the same summer festival economy shaping bookings across the scene, from the best Ibiza house parties in 2026 outward.

Why Peggy Gou matters

Peggy Gou matters because she is one of the very few artists to have taken house music, a genre with deep underground roots and a long history of resisting the mainstream, and carried it into the pop chart, the fashion house and the World Heritage riverside without hollowing it out. She did it as a Korean woman in a field long dominated by others, while making an explicit argument about identity, language and who house music belongs to. The stage name is Peggy Gou; the person is Kim Min-ji, born in Incheon, schooled in London, based in Berlin, and she has spent a decade proving that all three of those places can live inside the same four-on-the-floor groove.

For anyone making music now, her career is a study in leverage: own your label, choose your partners deliberately, treat image as a discipline, and never apologise for where you come from. She turned a Korean-language deep house record into a UK Top 5 single and a BRIT nomination on her own terms. That is not luck, and it is not fashion. It is a decade of work with a very clear idea at the centre of it, and the idea is still paying off.

FAQ

What is Peggy Gou's real name?

Peggy Gou's real name is Kim Min-ji (김민지), romanised as "Gim Minji" under the Revised Romanization system. She is a South Korean DJ, producer and singer, born in Incheon. "Peggy Gou" is the stage name she uses professionally, while Kim Min-ji is the name she was born with.

How old is Peggy Gou?

Peggy Gou was born on 3 July 1991, which makes her 35 as of August 2026. She began releasing music in the mid-2010s and had her international breakout with "It Makes You Forget (Itgehane)" in 2018, meaning she was already an experienced club artist by the time her pop crossover arrived in 2023.

Where is Peggy Gou from and where does she live?

She was born in Incheon, South Korea. As a teenager she moved to London, where she studied fashion and worked in fashion media, and she is now based in Berlin. London is often described by her and her promoters as a "second home" rather than a formal residence, so the accurate answer is Korean by birth, Berlin-based by choice.

What is Peggy Gou's most famous song?

Her biggest hit is "(It Goes Like) Nanana," released in 2023, which peaked at No. 5 on the UK Official Singles Chart, her first UK Top 10. It also charted across Europe and Australia and earned her a 2024 BRIT Award nomination. Her 2018 signature, "It Makes You Forget (Itgehane)," remains her most beloved club record.

What is Peggy Gou's record label?

She founded her own label, Gudu Records, in March 2019; "gudu" means "shoes" in Korean. Gudu is her own platform, but her 2024 debut album "I Hear You" was released by XL Recordings, a separate major-indie label. The two are often confused, but Gudu is hers and XL was the partner she chose for the album.

What kind of music does Peggy Gou make?

She makes house music, often described as "K-house," rooted in the warm, groove-led sound of 1990s house and sung in both Korean and English. Her records blend club functionality with a strong pop instinct, which is how "(It Goes Like) Nanana" could sit on the dancefloor and in the mainstream singles chart at once.

When did Peggy Gou release her debut album?

Her debut studio album, "I Hear You," was released on 7 June 2024 via XL Recordings. It runs to ten tracks built around 1990s house, includes "(It Goes Like) Nanana" and the Lenny Kravitz collaboration "I Believe in Love Again," and was followed by a bonus-tracks edition on 26 September 2024.

Did Peggy Gou play in the UK in 2026?

Yes. She headlined "Labyrinth on the Thames" at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, London, on 2 August 2026, her only UK date of the year. The open-air riverside show, at a UNESCO World Heritage Site, also featured Prospa, MPH, Kelly Lee Owens and Daisybelle.

What fashion brands has Peggy Gou worked with?

She modelled shoes in Louis Vuitton's Autumn/Winter 2020 campaign and featured in Nike's Air Max 270 "Just Go Bigger" campaign, and she has ties to Bulgari, Maybelline and TAG Heuer. She also runs her own fashion label, KIRIN, launched in 2019 with backing from New Guards Group and support from the late Virgil Abloh, and she is a member of the BoF 500.

Was Peggy Gou nominated for a BRIT Award?

Yes. At the 2024 BRIT Awards she became the first Korean artist ever nominated in the International Song category, for "(It Goes Like) Nanana." The nomination capped a run in which the track reached No. 5 in the UK during a chart week when the entire Top 6 was female solo artists for the first time in the chart's history.

Facts in this piece were checked against current sources in August 2026. If something has moved since, that is the nature of a living scene.