Phoebe Philo, Phoebe Philo
Fashionistas are swooning over the designer's new collection. I'm more enthralled by her name.
Last week, just after celebrating her 50th birthday, the British designer Phoebe Philo introduced a new eponymous collection—Philo called it an “edit”—that had the fashion press, and big-time fashion “influencers,”1 all aflutter. At The Cut, Cathy Horyn proclaimed it “the ultimate modern wardrobe.” It was “a confident, uncompromising delight,” Vogue’s Sarah Mower gushed. “This is not about fashion fantasy,” declared Vanessa Friedman (no relation) at the New York Times. “It’s about fashion reality.”
This is what fashion reality looks like:
I enjoy fashion, I have worked with clothing designers, and I have even been known to wear clothes, but I’m out of my depth here. It’s not that Phoebe Philo was unknown to me. I was aware that she’d acquired what’s often called “a cult following” when she worked for the designer label Céline, a brand name I’ve never been able to dissociate from the abhorrent French anti-Semite Louis-Ferdinand Céline. (You can read more about the latter Céline in an excellent essay published by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker in June 2022.) But I hadn’t really kept up, and so I came to this new Philo-genesis with fresh eyes.
To be completely honest, those fresh eyes perceive Philo’s new collection as more suitable for a museum exhibit than for actual daily wear, but I’m the first to admit I’m hardly the target market.
Here’s what I can say without equivocation: I am completely a fan of Phoebe Philo’s name. It’s so perfect in every way, it’s hard to believe that it’s not an invention but rather the name she’s had since her birth in 1973 to Richard and Celia Philo.
What’s so magical about “Phoebe Philo”? Let’s take a closer look.
It’s a classic
Both Phoebe and Philo have classical Greek roots, which is kind of unusual for a non-Greek person. (Philo père may have Greek ancestry, but I can’t confirm it.) In classical Greek, Phoíbē means “bright” or “radiant”; the Romans appropriated the masculine version, Phoebus, as an epithet of the god Apollo. Meanwhile, philo—”loving”—is a familiar combining form in words from philosophy to philanthropy, from philology to Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, and to “Philophiles,” which is what Phoebe Philo’s admirers call themselves. (Love lovers!) Together, “Phoebe” and “Philo” could plausibly be the scientific name of some exotic insect: Phoebephilo couturensis, maybe.
And how nice are “radiant” and “loving”? Such a promising start toward nominative determinism, even if Philo’s current creations skew more “dark” and “aggressive.”
It sounds phreaking phabulous
Then, for those of us interested in sound symbolism, there’s the way the name falls on the ear. The /ph/ at the beginning of each name—a voiceless labiodental fricative, for you scholarly types—is breathy but substantial, a fizzy pfft, and it’s reinforced by repetitive alliteration. The fee and fie syllables in Phoebe and Philo are familiar to every child who thrilled to “Fee, fie, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman!” from “Jack and the Beanstalk.”
Phoebe has echoes in other F-words, both nice and naughty: feed, feel, feast, female, fever, fiend. And Philo reminds us of file: another kind of collection or curation. (Who here has ever owned a Filofax? That brand, launched in 1921 and still in business, took its name from a compression of “file of facts.”)
The homophones, or near-homophones, of Philo bear mentioning as well. The paper-thin dough called filo or phyllo comes from Greek φύλλο (“leaf”). And the phylo- element in phylogeny—the representation of evolutionary relationships—comes from a Greek root meaning “tribe” or “kin.” Is Phoebe Philo turning over a new leaf and phashioning a new phamily tree?
My copy of The Secret Universe of Names, a slightly woo-woo book that purports to reveal “the dynamic interplay of names and destiny,” links Phoebe to other “Fb” names—Fabian, Fabio, Fabiola—and talks about the “struggle to coexist” between “flighty, flirtatious” F and “brash and bold” B. The combination “produces the awkward qualities found in the words fumble, fib, feeble, fly-by-night, flub, and goofball.” There's “very little suave subtlety to the FB personality, just an alluringly sexy character lurky behind a goofy, puppy-dog effervescence.”
When you look at it that way, those clothes make a bit more sense. Maybe.
It has a beat
PHOE-be PHI-lo: two trochees, the metrical form that employs one stressed and one unstressed syllable. Unlike the galloping meter of iambic pentameter—”But SOFT what LIGHT from YONder WINdow breaks”—trochaic rhythm runs. It’s incantatory: “ONCE uPON a MIDnight DREARy.” “TELL me NOT in MOURNful NUMbers.” “DOUBle DOUBle, TOIL and TROUBle.”
Can you hear it? PHOEbe PHIlo. PHOEbe PHIlo. It’s like a summons..
Phoebe: rare and a little weird
In the U.S., Phoebe has never ranked in the top 100 of baby names; at #214, it’s currently more popular than it’s been in 130 years. (I haven’t been able to get my hands on equivalent U.K. statistics.) I suspect its rarity has something to do with the weird spelling: We don’t expect /oe/ to sound like /ee/. That means little Phoebes have always stood out, which may make them either shy or showy. Phoebe Cates, born in 1963 at the nadir of Phoebe popularity, had a splashy acting career in her 20s, but recently has done only behind-the-scenes voice acting. The British actor Phoebe Waller-Bridge (b. 1985) and the American singer Phoebe Bridgers (b. 1995)—I always get them mixed up—have bolder personas. (The URL of Bridgers’s website is PhoebeFuckingBridgers.com.)
My favorite Phoebe is Phoebe Snow, both the late, wildly gifted American singer-songwriter and the fictional brand avatar whose name she adopted. The singer was born Phoebe Ann Laub in 1950, when most other Phoebes were in their 70s and 80s. She took her stage name from a character used by the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad in the early 1900s to advertise its clean-burning locomotives: “Phoebe Snow” was a fair-skinned blonde who always dressed all in white. In 1949, the Lackawanna railroad named one of its passenger trains the Phoebe Snow, and it was this train that the New Jersey-born singer paid tribute to with her name.
Philo: a name for the ages
Philo has always been a rare given name: Its popularity peaked in the 1880s (#1,253 among boy names in the U.S.), and it never again broke into the top 2,000. If you’re familiar with Philo, it may be because of the fame of television pioneer Philo Farnsworth, born near Beaver, Utah, in 1906, to a family of Latter-Day Saints. (Mormon baby names have inspired many online tributes; Utah Baby Namer is one of the oldest.) A tinkerer since childhood, Farnsworth moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1926 and applied for his first television patent in 1930, when he was just 24.
Before I ever heard of Farnsworth I’d learned about the life and work of Philo Judaeus, the Jewish-Hellenic philosopher and historian born around 20 BCE in Alexandria, Egypt. According to From Text to Tradition: A History of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism, “It was he who seized the opportunity to fuse Judaism systematically with the thought of the Hellenistic world in a corpus which today occupies some twenty‑five hundred printed pages. This contribution would be passed on by the church fathers and virtually ignored by the Jewish people, only to be rediscovered by them during the Italian Renaissance.”
Was he named Philo and then fulfilled his nominative destiny by becoming a philosopher? Or was he dubbed Philo Judaeus because he was a philosopher and a lover of Jews? It’s a mystery.
Here’s to you, Phoebe Philo
Am I overthinking this? Well, isn’t that in my job description? Listen: I encounter a lot of terrible, horrible, no-good names in my work and in the wild. When I find a splendid name as packed with meaning and euphony as “Phoebe Philo” I have to pause and give a worshipful little bow. Who cares about the clothes? Nothing she sews in her atelier could possibly be as beautifully and lastingly constructed as her name.
If you enjoyed this phlight of phancy, here are two other stories I’ve written about personal names: “All About ‘Taylor Swift’” and “My Name and I: A Hate/Love Story.”
I just cannot take this word seriously.
absolutely majestic writing, Nancy. What else would someone named Phoebe Philo do if fashion had not been it? I can imagine highly expensive interior design with slender-legged side tables that you can't put anything on, but that's not so far from fashion
I love this article, Nancy! I also love her name, which I always assumed was a nom d'couture! But your analytical description of the name's origins is the best. I did laugh at reality fashion. A separate reality from mine, I'm afraid.