My landline rang just before 9:00 in the morning on September 11, 2001. It was my fashion week colleague Mickey Boardman, and I assumed he was calling to gossip about the Marc Jacobs show that had taken place the night before. I was wrong.
The Jacobs show—the last event, it would turn out, of the spring 2002 New York collections—took place on a West Side Pier. It was hot, and it began hours late, and I remember the frazzled PRs handing out bottles of water to an increasingly antsy crowd. But whatever clothes finally came down the runway were completely forgotten the next morning.
If I stuck my head out my window, I could see one of the Twin Towers still standing, but with a huge burning slice out of it, like a jagged piece of pie. I called my best friend and fellow Village Voice writer Michael Musto and woke him up. Mikey, I said, something terrible happened. The Voice folded? he guessed. He was wrong.
Still, I ironed my outfit that day. The world may have been literally on fire, but I ironed. I believe I was wearing a Club Monaco skirt that was a faint homage to Dries Van Noten, and a saggy-baggy gray sweater—probably from the British brand Eskandar or Shirin Guild—over a lace camisole, my uniform 25 years ago. Thus attired, I walked over to the Voice office on Cooper Union. I didn’t know what else to do.
I grabbed my transistor radio—no cellphone then, at least not for me—and headed south toward Washington Square. A young man ran up to me. “What’s the news? My fiancée is down there.”
I met Musto at the Voice, and we went to the Manatus Diner on Bleecker Street, the kind of place that was always open. It was open that day.
Every light post would soon be filled with posters of photographs of the missing. The streets would fill with oceans of paper, the detritus of a thousand obliterated offices. A bad smell would linger in the air for months.
The fashion shows scheduled after Marc’s were immediately canceled. Some big houses, like Donna Karan and Ralph Lauren, would later show collections in scaled-down settings.
Vogue and Style.com would organize a collective presentation called “An American View” for young designers whose slender hopes of a career in the industry now hung by a thread.
All these years later I can still remember the realization that our collective sense of self, our deep seriousness about what we did for a living, had suddenly collapsed under the weight of contradictions. What we wrote about, what we professed to care so passionately about, what we analyzed with such deep hermeneutical precision, now felt embarrassingly trivial, almost ridiculous. I was fairly new to fashion reporting back then, and still beyond excited to be covering New York Fashion Week, even if the typical Village Voice reader, in all honesty, was probably not on the edge of his or her seat, waiting for my musings on Miguel Adrover or Imitation of Christ. Now the fragility of life itself loomed; the certainty that we were safe and secure in the city had vanished.
Miguel Adrover, spring 2002
Photo: JB Villareal / Shoot Digital for Style.com
Imitation of Christ, spring 2002
JB Villareal