its giving

"It's giving" is how you name the vibe something projects. When an outfit, a person, a situation radiates a specific energy or aesthetic, this phrase captures it: "it's giving confidence," "it's giving chaos," "it's giving expensive." The construction is intentionally incomplete—the sentence ends without saying what exactly is being given, creating a knowing shorthand between speaker and listener.

The phrase emerged in New York City's ballroom culture during the 1980s, created by Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ communities who developed an entire vocabulary for evaluating presence and performance. Original uses like "it's giving face" (radiating charisma) or "it's giving body" (commanding physical presence) were tools for a community that made art from self-presentation. For forty years, it lived in oral tradition—spoken in ballrooms, at gatherings, among friends—but rarely written down.

TikTok changed that around 2020. The phrase exploded into mainstream use, evolving into a flexible template where you could drop in any noun or adjective to describe what you were sensing. What took four decades to travel from ballroom competitions to global TikTok reveals something about whose language gets documented and whose gets discovered only when it goes viral. The phrase itself—efficient, creative, leaving things unsaid—reflects the linguistic innovation that happens in communities building their own ways of seeing and being seen.