When Tommy was shooting for Style.com and Phil was shooting for Vogue.com, between about 2010 to 2015, did you feel a healthy rivalry?
Ton: I think one of the reasons why we stay friends is that even though there is some level of friendly competition—
Oh: —he’s doing his thing and I’m doing my thing. We have different styles. We don’t really feel envious.
A Tommy picture and a Phil picture are different. Has maintaining your own aesthetics become more difficult now that the photographers outside shows has gone from maybe 15 to maybe 150?
Oh: Not for me because I like the cast of characters.
Ton: He loves it.
Oh: I don’t really know why. It makes it look more fun. So I don’t really mind when there are other people in the shot. That said, they’re not always pretty, beautiful pictures, so it’s a trade off, I guess.
Ton: I was already complaining about too many photographers in 2012. It gradually got worse and worse.
Oh: All of a sudden there was like a tipping—
Ton: —point. At one point I started crying. It was the end of the season in 2012. I was just like, this is too much for me. I went to someone’s hotel and collapsed like, “I just can’t take this anymore.” It can be hard to stay motivated to do this because you’re getting older and it’s… I don’t know.
Oh: Granted the other nine months of the year we have plenty of free time! [Laughs.] But those three months of Fashion Week are really fucking hard. We are shooting all day, no time for meals, and then have to edit photos all night. You get like three, four hours of sleep. Four weeks straight at a time.
Ton: That’s the thing about the schedule for the whole month: It seems like it’s so much fun, but gradually, you know, just repeating it over and over again, moving over to Europe, switching to different time zones without even a day off. It’s a lot to take on mentally and physically—even when we were in our 20s and early 30s.
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