NO DEY FOLLOW: SEEING LAGOS THROUGH MICHAEL BASSEY’S LENS
Old buildings. Yellow buses. Iron monuments. Five models dressed like they belong somewhere between the past and whatever comes next. In “No Dey Follow,” Michael Bassey turns Lagos into a conversation between memory, fashion and creative instinct.
By Asteroid Media
Lagos is the kind of city you can see every day and eventually stop seeing at all.
The traffic becomes background noise. Yellow buses blur into the road. Buildings become landmarks you pass without looking. The chaos becomes ordinary.
That changed for photographer and creative director Michael Bassey in September 2025.
After spending an entire month in Lagos, his longest stay in the city, Bassey began noticing what familiarity often hides: ageing architecture, textures, movement, people and the strange ease with which old Lagos continues existing beside the new.
From that observation came one question:
What happens when contemporary fashion is placed inside a part of Lagos already carrying so much memory?
The answer became No Dey Follow.
Lagos, But Look Again
The film does not attempt to transform Lagos into a polished fashion set.
It does something more interesting.
It uses what is already there.
Buildings dating back decades, iron structures, busy streets and spaces where people have lived, traded, worked and passed through for years become the backdrop for clothing intentionally designed not to disappear into the environment.
The contrast is the point.
Bassey describes wanting to place something contemporary in front of something carrying the memory of another time. The fashion does not try to become Lagos.
It interrupts it.
And suddenly, places that might normally disappear into the everyday demand another look.
That same idea runs through the title.
No Dey Follow is simple Nigerian advice: don’t blindly follow.
But inside this editorial, it becomes a creative instruction.
Working with stylist Omoge Logistics, Bassey approached the clothing less as everyday fashion and more as character-building.
The styling combines Afrocentric references, Nigerian cultural elements, streetwear and traditional influences, creating silhouettes that deliberately step outside ordinary dressing.
The goal was never to ask, Would someone wear this to brunch?
That would be missing the point.
Editorial fashion gives the team permission to ignore questions like: Does this match? Is this normal? Is this wearable?
Instead, the questions become: Does it create a mood? Does it make you stop? Does it feel interesting?
Five models became five different interpretations of that philosophy.
“The more you wear it, the more you own it,” one voice says during the film.
That line could almost summarize the entire project.
The clothes only fully exist once personality enters them.
Fashion As Lagos Memory
The film also understands that clothes in Lagos have never been merely decoration.
What people wear can communicate background, celebration, class, community, religion, aspiration and attitude long before a conversation begins.
Lagos style has always borrowed, adapted and reinterpreted.
Traditional references meet imported influences. Streetwear meets ceremony. Yesterday appears again with different proportions.
No Dey Follow taps into that history without attempting to recreate it.
Bassey makes this distinction clear: the team was not trying to reproduce the past. They were taking something from the culture surrounding them and interpreting it through their own eyes.
That is where the project becomes less about nostalgia and more about continuation.
The city changes.
Fashion changes with it.
The Beauty Of Not Knowing Exactly
There is a particularly revealing moment in the film when Bassey talks about photography itself.
Sometimes, he says, you do not know exactly what you are searching for.
You simply know you do not want the obvious.
That uncertainty sits beautifully inside No Dey Follow.
Behind the finished images are adjustments, movement, laughter, styling corrections, lighting changes and repeated instructions. The film allows us to see the image becoming an image.
An idea that once existed only in somebody’s head slowly takes physical form.
For Bassey, that is where photography becomes freedom: experimenting, making mistakes, trying something strange and creating an image that did not exist before.
Eventually, every creative faces the same decision.
Do you make what people expect?
Or do you make what you actually want to see?
No Dey Follow chooses the second option.
It takes Lagos, a city photographed endlessly, and asks whether there is still another way to look at it.
There is.
You simply have to stop following the familiar route.
Because sometimes creativity begins exactly where imitation ends.
Credits
Photography & Creative Direction — @_michaelbassey
Stylist — @Omoge_logistic1
Female Model 1 — @itsmariamfatusin
Female Model 2 — @meeky_shine
Female Model 3 — @olatemmzy
Male Model 1 — @bolikk.ib
Male Model 2 — @Josephamodel_
Hairstylist — @irun_by_z
Makeup Artist — @tifes_glamour
Light — @sha_drachhh
Videography — @atitebidemola
Location: Lagos, Nigeria