Tommy Ton

The eagle-eyed Tommy Ton is a Canadian photographer turned creative director, perhaps best known for his fashion blog Jak & Jil, and his street style coverage of fashion weeks for Style.com and GQ.com. Following the closure of Style.com, Ton launched his own website, tommyton.com. The website features more than 15,000 Ton-lensed images from the past decade, including those previously featured on Style.com, GQ.com and the photographer’s former blog, Jak & Jil, in addition to numerous unpublished and exclusive images. In 2017, Ton was appointed creative director of the New York-based label, Deveaux.

When Ton was 13 years old, he was asked to record a television show, which featured Tom Ford , by his sister. Ford, who was expressing his views on gender and sexuality impressed Ton and sparked the young Canadian’s interest in fashion, with a desire to become a designer.

At 15, he interned with a local fashion designer Wayne Clark, which led to Ton’s first job in the women’s accessory department of Canadian department store Holt Renfrew. Whilst working in the women’s accessory department, Ton in turn impressed Barbara Atkin, vice president of fashion direction of Holt Renfrew, who secured him a job in the department store’s buying office.

In 2005, encouraged by the rise of online magazines, Ton launched Jak & Jil, a website originally intended to be a lifestyle publication featuring products and people from Toronto. Ton’s snapshots of stylish Torontonians were particularly well received and soon became the focus of the site, which gradually evolved into a street style blog.

Ton’s big photographic break came when Hong Kong-based department store chain Lane Crawford asked him to shoot the store’s Spring/Summer 2009 campaign. In the 2009 Autumn/Winter season, Ton was asked to sit front-row at Dolce & Gabbana, along with fellow fashion bloggers Bryanboy, Garance Doré and Scott Schuman . Publications such as The New York Times and The Boston Globe soon began requesting and running his photographs.

Former Style.com editor-in-chief Dirk Standen asked Ton to take over from Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist, covering fashion week street style for the website. In 2015, Co-fonders Matthew Breen and Andrea Tsao established the menswear label, Deveaux, tapping Ton as the brand’s creative director in 2017. In his role Ton expanded the brand into womenswear, debuting the line during New York Fashion Week in September 2018.

Ton continued to be the main contributor of fashion week street style coverage for both Style.com, soon to relaunch as Vogue Runway, and GQ, making him the one of the most widely published photographers documenting the influential street style fashion moment that has informed photography, design and editorial content for half a decade.