Fashion Week tents became field hospitals – while the venue for the Marc Jacobs show was turned into a makeshift morgue: How two fashion editors ended up as witnesses to the unfolding catastrophe on 9/11

I heard a dull bang that sounded like a bomb

by Laura Craik, then Fashion Editor, Evening Standard 

I will never forget 9/11, but nor do I always want to remember it.

On Saturday, September 8, 2001, I flew to New York Fashion Week. As Fashion Editor of London newspaper The Evening Standard, it was a journey that I made twice a year, alongside a cohort of journalists, stylists, buyers and photographers.

That September we were there for eight days to see the spring/summer 2002 collections from the likes of designers Ralph Lauren and Michael Kors.

On the morning of the 11th, I rose early, having persuaded the Standard’s photographer Cavan Pawson that we should cover the Liz Lange show, scheduled to take place at Bryant Park at 9am.

Liz Lange wasn’t a well-known designer, but she was showing maternity wear, a first for New York Fashion Week, and I thought a catwalk of pregnant models would look impactful in the paper.

We were up and out by 8.40am, which was unusual. Hailing a yellow cab from outside our hotel a little more than a mile away from the World Trade Centre, we set off in slow-moving traffic towards Bryant Park, the hub of New York Fashion Week on Sixth Avenue between 40th and 42nd Street.

As we did so, a passenger plane flew low over West Broadway. I heard the roar of its engines over the traffic as it made its way towards the Twin Towers.

Arriving at Bryant Park, everything seemed normal. Cavan took up his position in the photographer’s pen at the end of the catwalk, while I took my seat on the front row. Shortly before the show was due to start, Cavan called me on my Nokia.

He said his picture editor had just phoned to say there had been a plane crash, and they wanted him to go to the scene.

Cavan had worked in Iraq and had the quick instincts of a war photographer. His pictures of the collapsed towers were the first to drop in the UK.

Not much more than 15 minutes later, the fashion show finished. But as we were exiting the venue, the mood changed. Everyone was on their phones, speaking urgently. I heard gasps and felt a rising pulse of panic.

On the street, the steady buzz of a sunny New York morning at rush hour had descended into chaos and fear. New Yorkers, always so stoical, were panicking like extras in a disaster movie.

Some were sprinting down the sidewalk, anguished. Others were jumping on to the nearest bus. Before I’d walked a block, an assistant on the paper in the UK office called. I told her people were really panicking about the plane crash. ‘It’s not a plane crash,’ she told me. ‘It’s a terrorist attack.’

Mid-call, the line went dead. Unable to call my family and not knowing what else to do, I started to walk back to my hotel, a 30-block journey towards the World Trade Centre, that would take me about an hour. At some point, I heard a loud, dull bang that sounded like a bomb.

Assuming the city was under attack, I remember standing in midtown, looking up at the sky and deciding whether, if a bomb should fall, I’d rather seek shelter or see it coming. I later learned the bang I’d heard was the first tower collapsing, at 9.58am, 56 minutes after being struck by United Airlines Flight 175.

Making my way downtown, like everyone that day, I saw things I never hope to see again. The most haunting was a father and his young daughter, he in a suit, she in a gingham school dress, their clothes and faces covered in ash.

The closer I got to the Twin Towers, the more ash-covered people I saw, walking as if asleep, their shock still evident beneath their covered faces. The acrid pungent stench – of dust and debris, chemicals and metal – came in waves, hastening and receding in the wind.

It would be the last time I entered my hotel without having to pass several cordons and a line of police.

Once in my room, bar the phone lines being down, everything else seemed obscenely normal. I don’t remember the TV ever not working, but I do remember every channel playing a narrow selection of music that had been deemed sombre enough to accompany reportage of the biggest terrorist attack in modern times. To this day, I can’t hear Yellow by Coldplay without being taken back there.

At some point, the phone lines were restored and I was given word that the news desk wanted me to file a report. For the next three days, I wrote about what I saw on the streets. Had there been anyone else there to do this, they would have asked them.

In 2001, most news editors doubted a fashion editor’s ability to spell, much less cover a world-changing, history-making news story. I later learned that there was a lot of professional jealousy among the chief news reporters, all stuck in London until US airspaces opened and flights resumed again.

The following hours and days are lodged like shrapnel in the memory; short, sharp shards of recollection, rather than any coherent timeline. That evening, needing to eat, we were surprised to find some restaurants open.

At Barolo on West Broadway, near our hotel, four firefighters sat at the next table, their uniforms covered in ash. Incredibly, a server came out to apologise for the extended wait. Even more incredibly, one of my party complained about how long it took to bring the wine. I learned that people deal with shock in different ways.

The following morning, New York had already shifted gear into ‘business as usual’ mode. Rudolph Giuliani, the city’s mayor, was defiantly unequivocal. ‘Go about your normal day. People should go to stores, go to restaurants, take their children out. Show confidence in yourself and in the city.’

But it felt like too much too soon. The streets were empty of traffic, the tumult of the previous day bleeding into disconcerting silence. Nerves jangled in the void. Every noise was ominous.

I walked uptown, with no destination in mind. I passed people full of purpose: dogs being walked, children taken to playgrounds, people searching the streets for clues to the whereabouts of lost loved ones. On Union Square, large sheets of brown paper had been taped to the ground for people to write down their thoughts. Messages were scrawled in many languages. ‘Think and don’t forget. Help and don’t hurt,’ said one. Another simply said ‘WHY?’ 

Gratitude towards nurses, fire services and police was chalked on to the pavement. Further uptown, on 36th street, a news channel was filming. People queued ten-deep, clutching photos of loved ones and pointing them at the cameras. Wherever there were wire fences, there were photos of the missing, names and contact numbers written in Sharpies underneath. Men and women wept openly.

On Times Square at Broadway and Seventh Avenue, a billboard declared that ‘More than nine in ten Americans support military action against those responsible for yesterday’s attack.’

The organisers of New York Fashion Week had immediately galvanised into action, offering resources such as tents and bottled water to the rescue and relief efforts. Catwalk tents had initially been redeployed as field hospitals; when it became apparent that there would be no survivors, they were turned into family centres where people could bring items from lost family members to try to match their DNA at some point.

Chelsea Pier 54, the venue for the Marc Jacobs show, became a temporary morgue. And defying all expectations, New York Fashion Week resumed on September 17, with scaled-back presentations whose justification was that ‘the show must go on’, if only to preserve Manhattan’s economy.

I didn’t go to them. Instead, I walked the city, now dotted with American flags that semaphored the defiance of its citizens.

I think I was in New York for a total of eight days. I don’t really remember flying home, apart from being half terrified, and half convinced the skies had never been safer. I have no recollection of entering my flat, or of the days that followed.

I’ve always loved New York, but being there on that day tethered me to the city in ways I can’t describe. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, people asked whether there was any such thing as safety: 25 years on, with war still raging around us, the answer remains unchanged.

My hotel lobby was now a hellscape

by Jo Elvin, then Editor of Glamour Magazine

In 2019, 18 years after 9/11, I went to interview the hypnotist Paul McKenna. Unable to think of a real problem I had for him to solve – I don’t smoke and I don’t want to quit my shopping addiction – I found myself telling him things I’d never told anyone.

That when I see men standing by themselves on Tube carriages wearing backpacks, I switch carriages as soon as I can. That I need to take long, deep breaths as I approach the Underground platform. That every morning when I get dressed, I ask myself if I can run in the shoes I’ve chosen, or at least kick them off quickly.

Mercifully, he didn’t react as if he was looking at a crazy person. We chatted for a while as he tried to delve into what might be the root of this, and eventually I told him that I’d been in downtown Manhattan on the morning of September 11, 2001.

At the time I was the Editor in Chief of British Glamour magazine and I was there for New York Fashion Week. I don’t remember exactly his response, but the gist was, ‘Well… duh!’

He talked about PTSD which I instantly batted away. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is something that happens to soldiers who’ve seen combat, or someone who’s been violently attacked. I would never pretend that my experience of that day was anything like proper trauma.

But then Paul explained something that made a lot of sense. It sounded to him as though my body had experienced a primal response on that day – fight or flight – and it was now stuck in that mode. Which is the basic definition of PTSD.

On the morning of September 11, I was staying at The Soho Grand Hotel and was getting ready for a meeting with New York magazine colleagues.

I was having a shower at 8.45am when the shower head sort of shuddered back and forth a few times. My first thought was, ‘I am more hungover than I thought’, and smiled to myself at how wonderful the party thrown by designer Marc Jacobs had been the night before.

Later I would realise that the juddering was caused by vibrations from the impact of the plane hitting the first tower just a few blocks away.

I made my way to the hotel reception, still completely unaware of what was unfolding. The elevator doors opened into the hotel lobby and… my God!

Just the night before, I’d been sitting in that very same lobby with the Legally Blonde star Selma Blair, both of us sipping wine at the bar as I interviewed her for a magazine feature.

Now hundreds of people were swarming through the doors to escape the violent tsunami of dust flattening everything in its path. While I’d been in the lift, the second tower had come down.

Somehow, my magazine team and I found each other in the packed lobby and quickly realised our Nokia bricks would not put our calls through to loved ones in London. Feeling shocked, aimless and utterly useless, we had no idea what to do. In the end we went to a bar across the road and sat wordlessly watching the live coverage on CNN. Outside were abandoned cars, doors open, radios blaring, people walking around openly crying.

Remarkably, I spotted Selma Blair, who looked dazed and distressed. I remembered she’d said she lived in LA and was here on her own, so I invited her to sit with us and share a stiff drink.

She hugged me gratefully, and told me she’d just tried to give blood at a hospital but been turned away.

That was an awful moment: realising the grim fact that there was no one coming out of those towers who would need blood.

Suddenly I was aware of all the smoke and dust in the air. My thoughts turned to a feature I’d read in a magazine about terrorists using biological weapons. Could the planes have been loaded with some terrifying contagion? Sitting with Selma and my fashion team in that bar, I withdrew into a silent but very real panic attack.

Not long after, the CNN reporter said the authorities were testing the air for anthrax, and I swallowed down rising tears. I wasn’t being paranoid.

‘What’s anthrax?’ asked Selma Blair. I felt so guilty when I told her, and she cried again.

No one slept that night. When I finally gave up and got out of bed at 5am, I looked out the window, and saw a ghost stagger down the street. I could see the shape of his fire helmet and uniform, but he was paper white, covered in ash from head to toe.

With all flights grounded, we were stuck there. I spent hours walking around a silent city, passing hundreds of posters of faces of ‘missing’ loved ones. At the end of each day, I would go back to my hotel room and cry.

For a while afterwards, I could feel sandy-like grit in my mouth, grinding between my teeth. We were all ingesting the vapour trails of pulverised concrete, steel, fuel and probably other matter that I can’t bring myself to spell out.

Back in London six days later, my emotional response felt like a deep grief – a helpless sadness about how violent and cruel human beings could be.

Over the years the fear mutated and extended as my brain seized upon infinite possibilities. I was not physically harmed, thankfully, and I realise that.

But to say ‘nothing’ happened to me isn’t quite accurate, either. It triggered, on a primal level, a mode of shock and fear that my body got stuck in.

All this time later, and with Paul McKenna’s help, I can now get on a Tube without panicking. But I have also learnt that my emotional response was utterly valid. And I never wear shoes I can’t run in.