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By Steff Yotka

To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.

To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.

It was February 2007. Balenciaga’s Lego shoes had just walked the Paris runway and designer Nicolas Ghesquière was telling Style.com’s Sarah Mower, “It’s a big mix—a street mix, with symbols and colors that are very multicultural. […] It’s about how girls become themselves.” Outside the show, two North American guys with point-and-shoot cameras in hand were waiting to capture the “big mix” that had inspired Ghesquière’s collection: street style.

Before they picked up their cameras and registered their domain names, Tommy Ton and Phil Oh were a fashion-obsessed and a party-obsessed pair, one from Toronto, the other from Chicago, who landed in Paris with suitcases full of their best, brightest outfits. “We didn’t know anyone,” laughed Ton as we met to reminisce before the Christopher John Rogers show in Brooklyn earlier this month.

It’s been 15 years since that moment and almost nothing of the circa 2007 fashion industry remains. (Ghesquière left Balenciaga in 2013, Style.com became Vogue Runway in 2015, and the Lego shoe was replaced by a more walkable Balenciaga hit in similar primary colors in 2017: The Triple S.) But Tommy and Phil, as everyone with a front row seat or backstage pass knows them, are still outside venues from New York to Paris, as rapt as ever with the wardrobes of the fashion world. Why? Sheer perseverance? Obsession? Wild, unmeasurable financial success?

Elena Perminova, Michelle Violy Harper, Natalie Joos, Mira Duma, Anya Ziourova, Anna Della Russo, and Giovanna Battaglia Englebert in New York in 2013