Designers tend to speak in code. Often they don’t speak at all. That was the case last Thursday when Ramon Martin and Ryan Lobo, partners in Tome, a three-year-old fashion label, began scrutinizing the parade of comely young women filing into their studio on West 25th Street.

Ksenia, Ilze, Ruoyang and Alyosha, their names suggesting a conclave of coltish United Nations interns, were among those submitting that day to an inspection as exhilarating for some as it was tense. “There are decisions being made,” Mr. Lobo said, “and these girls know it the minute they walk in that door.”

Typically at their castings, those decisions are communicated “through a nod, a glance, a grimace,” Mr. Lobo said, a covert exchange between the designers and their collaborators: Brittany Adams, on temporary leave from her job as an associate editor at Style.com, and the stylist Michelle Jank.