Two People, a Camera, and the Whole Heady World

2010 was peak fashion blog. Everyone with taste and a decent camera was publishing something, and most of it was forgettable—mood boards dressed up as editorial, outfits photographed against brick walls, the same five influencer touchstones repeated until they lost all meaning. Occasionally, though, you’d find something that felt genuinely alive: someone who understood there’s a whole register between commercial catalog and art-school statement where the clothes are just clothes and the people wearing them are just people.

Philipp Langenheim—who’d been running the smart and unpretentious Hundertmark Blog—launched something new with his collaborator Vivian Ronge called New Kids On The Blog: fashion photography, videos, and street-style portraits of strangers they’d ambushed with a camera. Philipp was spending six months in New York at the time, which gave the whole project a pleasingly transatlantic quality. Vivian and I had been talking about going to Tokyo together at some point—the city kept surfacing in everything we were shooting and reading—and at a certain point you stop talking and just book the flight.

What I liked about what they were building was its lightness. No manifesto, no brand positioning, no sponsorship language. Just two people looking at things and finding them interesting. That was enough. In the years since, fashion blogging collapsed under the weight of its own monetization—every post a paid placement, every photographer angling for a brand deal—and it’s easy to forget there was a moment when the whole thing felt like a genuine subculture rather than an unpaid internship at a PR firm. New Kids On The Blog caught some of that moment on the way out.