“I all the time inform my youngsters, the extra you mess about, the extra you discover out,” she stated, utilizing a fruitier time period than “mess.”

“Fairly shortly, I noticed that work was one thing I wanted,” she stated, “and I feel I had a way it was truly going to be inside trend,” even when she knew she didn’t wish to return to what she had carried out. In most large homes, designers’ jobs finish on the runway. They don’t oversee the advert campaigns or the merchandising or the shop design. Ms. Philo wished to have fingers in all of that. Even when independence and a start-up meant not flying first-class or having a driver or a lot of orchids within the workplace.

“Basically, that’s not the stuff that makes me comfortable,” Ms. Philo stated. The stuff that makes her comfortable includes baking, galleries, driving, clubbing, her household, her mates. She stated she is consistently “strolling the tightrope” between guaranteeing downtime and discovering inspiration. “As soon as she is aware of she will be able to belief you, there are not any obstacles,” Ms. Rogers stated.

After Ms. Rogers’s husband, the architect Richard Rogers, fell throughout a visit to Mexico and was within the hospital for months, Ms. Philo came visiting for breakfast sooner or later carrying a giant grey tweed coat Ms. Rogers admired. “She simply took it off and gave it to me,” Ms. Rogers stated, and refused to take it again. “It’s stored me protected and heat since.”

Edward Enninful, the previous editor of British Vogue, who has been mates with Ms. Philo since they had been youngsters in West London, stated he used to bug her endlessly about when she would make males’s put on. “I all the time anticipated I must purchase one in all her ladies’s coats and get it tailor-made,” he stated.

Then, simply earlier than the Vogue Awards in London final yr, she offered him with a grey double-breasted swimsuit, “simply because she wished me to be ok with myself,” he stated. “I all the time put on black. I had by no means worn grey in my life, however I trusted her. It was very liberating.”