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

“Fairly rapidly, I spotted that work was one thing I wanted,” she mentioned, “and I believe I had a way it was truly going to be inside vogue,” even when she knew she didn’t wish to return to what she had accomplished. In most huge 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 top quality or having a driver or a lot of orchids within the workplace.

“Basically, that’s not the stuff that makes me completely satisfied,” Ms. Philo mentioned. The stuff that makes her completely satisfied includes baking, galleries, using, clubbing, her household, her pals. She mentioned she is continually “strolling the tightrope” between making certain downtime and discovering inspiration. “As soon as she is aware of she will belief you, there are not any obstacles,” Ms. Rogers mentioned.

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 at some point carrying a giant grey tweed coat Ms. Rogers admired. “She simply took it off and gave it to me,” Ms. Rogers mentioned, and refused to take it again. “It’s saved me protected and heat since.”

Edward Enninful, the previous editor of British Vogue, who has been pals with Ms. Philo since they had been children in West London, mentioned 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 every of her girls’s coats and get it tailor-made,” he mentioned.

Then, simply earlier than the Style Awards in London final yr, she offered him with a grey double-breasted go well with, “simply because she wished me to be ok with myself,” he mentioned. “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.”