Our House – The Gio Goi Clothing Family

Manchester in the 1980s was an exciting place to live. “Dodging the rain and the bullets” as Chris and Anthony Donnelly put it. A revolution was taking place in the city’s nightclubs, and the brothers were in the middle of it. His world, like ours, would have been a very different place without him.

Gio Goi was born out of Donnelly’s love of electronic house music. Today they remember being in the shoes of New Order leader Bernard Sumner, hearing for the first time the pulsing of the drums and the synthesizers called clarion calls. They were instantly hooked, and as they and other advocates championed the music among their friends, club nights dedicated to it sprang up all over the city, including at the legendary Hacienda club run by Manchester legend Tony Wilson.

House music is in Gio Goi’s blood. The vibrant, tribal rhythms, a fusion of black and white American influences, originated in Chicago and migrated to New York, where visiting British DJs like Mike Pickering heard them at clubs like The Paradise Garage. Acting as cultural scouts, these DJs brought rare private label records to England and played them to an appreciative audience, sowing the seeds for what would become known as ‘The Second Summer of Love’.

Anthony and Chris created clothing that matched the house music vibe: t-shirts and zip-up track tops that pay homage to the clubs’ glow stick vibe. They soon began selling these garments to friends and family at The Hacienda, creating a community spirit that elevated the brand to identity status.

House music enjoyed its euphoric heyday in the early 1990s before giving way to a new wave of musicians; staying true to his roots, Gio Goi recognized something special in these new contenders. Soon they were rolling with the likes of The Happy Mondays and Oasis, and rubbing shoulders with the glamorously rakish Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse. While all this was going on, house music continued to grow in warehouses and clubs, exploring new techniques and rhythms to keep people dancing late into the night.

Now a new generation of DJs and dance music stars have been unleashed on appreciative audiences, including Deadmau5, something of a figurehead for the dance renaissance. He and Gio Goi have worked closely together to keep their respective art forms at the forefront of innovation in recent years; Deadmau5 has even modeled new ranges for the brand.

Speaking of which, the current range consolidates Gio Goi’s past glories but updates them with a revamped color palette and silhouettes designed to reflect the multicultural, metropolitan environment we find ourselves in. Matte colors and natural fabrics underpin bold ‘in your face’ prints; Vibrant shades of orange, sigma blue and royal red jostle for pride of place on knitted polo shirts and the ubiquitous Gio Goi T-shirts. The cuts are also slimmer than before, revealing the brand’s rejuvenating rock and roll influence.

Gio Goi is one of the rare ones: a label that stays true to its roots but is able to adapt to new influences and environments, keeping the music scene dressed in the most current styles. Like the coveted white labels early house DJs brought back from America, Gio Goi’s new range of clothing is freshly pressed and soon to make a big splash on the underground scene.