By RACHEL SWARNS


WASHINGTON - The holiday party at the Phillips Collection art museum earlier this month brimmed with Champagne and well-known names. But knowledgeable party people breezed past the senators and television personalities to hover around a striking, willowy woman with a shimmering Oscar de la Renta dress and an unfamiliar face.

The woman was Desiree Rogers, the 49-year-old Chicago corporate executive and civic leader who streaked to the top of this city’s social list last month when President- elect Barack Obama announced that she would be the White House social secretary.

Ms.Rogers, an Obama fund-raiser and an executive at Allstate Financial, will oversee every White House social event from Easter egg hunts to lavish state dinners (along with those oh-so-important guest lists).

She will be the country’s first black presidential social secretary. And the requests for her presence at exclusive social events here are already streaming in. After eight years of the Bush administration’s early-to-bed presidency, Washington hostesses are hoping the Obamas will revitalize political night life.“She’s going to get invitations hourly, truly,”said Ann Stock, who was social secretary during the Clinton administration .

“This is an historic moment and you have tremendous interest in the White House right now,”Ms.Stock added.“She really is, if you will, the face of the new administration.”

Originally from New Orleans, Ms.Rogers has an M.B.A. from Harvard University, a philanthropic orientation, a penchant for designer fashions, a diverse and powerful group of friends and a reputation for stylish entertaining.

She is a well-known businesswoman who ran Peoples Gas and North Shore Gas, a $1.1 billion utility in Chicago, from 2004 until June of this year, when she became president of a unit of Allstate Financial.

Still, she knows little of the ways of Washington.“You’re going into a place where you don’t really know anybody,” said Linda Johnson Rice, a friend of Ms.Rogers’s and head of the Chicago company that owns Ebony and Jet magazines, prominent publications aimed at African- Americans.“But she knows politicians in Chicago and she knows politics.”

The Obamas have said they would like to open the White House to Americans from all walks of life, and friends of Ms.Rogers say no one can do that better than she.

David Mosena, president of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, where Ms.Rogers serves as a trustee, said,“I’ve not seen a world in which she’s not comfortable.”