ORIGINAL FAKE

2020

 

Original Fake is a digital collage series created in collaboration with Nigerian fashion designer and artist Bubu Ogisi. The project explores Lagos’s counterfeit economy, where markets overflow with fabrics, sequins, and logo-saturated textiles imported from China and locally reconfigured into inventive mash-ups. In this environment, luxury is not purchased from flagship boutiques—almost entirely absent from the continent—but rather imagined, remixed, and performed through street markets and bespoke adaptations.

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As long as luxury brands have existed, so too have counterfeits. In Lagos, this parallel economy thrives not simply as imitation but as a site of cultural ingenuity. During the World Cup, vendors distinguished their jerseys as “original-fake” or “fake-fake,” a taxonomy that speaks as much to humor and survival as to status. The phenomenon underscores the city’s paradox: despite vast economic inequality, Lagos is among the world’s top consumers of champagne, and its luxury culture cuts across class lines.

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The series investigates this fascination without glorifying it, situating counterfeit culture as a mirror of aspiration, resilience, and belief in future abundance. In the hands of market traders and local designers, counterfeit materials are transformed into dazzling assemblages—handbags bearing Chanel, Off-White, and Louis Vuitton simultaneously, or sequined textiles stitched into celebratory garments. These hybrid objects embody swagger and optimism, but also expose the entanglement of global branding, postcolonial consumer desire, and indigenous creativity.

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By collaging counterfeit fabrics sourced directly from Lagos markets, Dugger and Ogisi render visible the layered codes of status, success, and survival embedded in this visual economy. Original Fake becomes less about forgery than about invention, showing how a controversial practice functions as both cultural critique and affirmation of style. In the space between scarcity and spectacle, the series reveals how counterfeit luxury in Lagos is not simply a symbol of lack, but an aesthetic of possibility.