The night before September 11, 2001, I was at the Marc Jacobs show in New York – held on Pier 54 on the Hudson River and slated to start at 6 p.m. It was always the show to be at during New York Fashion Week. At the time, I was the beauty director of Jane magazine and had been given especially good seats for a non-fashion editor – in the second row – because Jacobs was also launching his first perfume that night. The show started late, but no one cared because it was so buzzy. The audience was star-studded, with Sarah Jessica Parker, Sofia Coppola, Monica Lewinsky and the ubiquitous Donald Trump (he was always hanging around at Fashion Week), with the then Melania Knauss. At the end of the show, the backdrop, which I remember as a massive wall of flowers, parted to reveal the rest of the pier, decorated for the after-party and fragrance launch. It was a total New York moment: walking down the runway and stepping out onto the rest of the pier, with drinks and sushi, sinewy models and a spectacular view down the Hudson. It was glamorous and fun, and also a chance for me to catch up with my London fashion friends, including one of my closest friends, Vanessa Gillingham, who was the fashion director of British Glamour.

I remember this all in such clear detail because of what happened the next day. I got home late from the party so I slept in a little before another busy day at fashion week. The phone rang around 8.50 a.m; it was my brother-in-law Lee Mascarenhas, an anesthesiologist in Dallas, asking me if I was all right. I jokingly said, “Yes, but I haven’t had any coffee yet.” He asked where my then-husband John was. I said he was walking our dog in Riverside Park, near where we lived on the Upper West Side. Lee told me to turn on the TV.

The streets of downtown New York are covered in debris after both World Trade Towers collapsed from a terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 in New York City. |  Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty ImagesThat’s when I saw the first plane had gone into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. Neither of us knew the magnitude of what was happening yet. I quickly hung up and called John who said he had seen someone turning off the gas mains in the park and, when he asked him why, the man said he had no idea – he’d just been ordered to do it. John came sprinting home. I called another best friend and fellow editor, Kate Growney, who lived on 11th Street downtown – she was on her roof terrace. Together we watched, from our respective parts of Manhattan, as the second plane went into the tower at 9.03 am. It was immediately apparent this was no longer an accident as had first been reported, this was targeted terrorism. I called my parents in the U.K. and left a message on their answering machine saying I was OK. Thank goodness I did because, after that, all the phone lines were jammed and my mother couldn’t get through. She had watched the news footage in horror on the TV at our local chemists in Notting Hill and had gone rushing home to call me. It was Fashion Week, I could have been anywhere in the city.

I remember watching, watching, watching as the towers burned on my TV, as the plane went into the Pentagon, as another ploughed into a field in Pennsylvania, as people leapt to their deaths from the inferno and saying “the towers are going to fall.” My husband said, “no way” – they were so huge, so immutable, it was impossible to imagine. And then they did. That peeling of the steel, that vast cloud of dust billowing through the Financial District, the finality of it.

That was the beginning of the endless news cycle, the news ticker scrolling updates across the bottom of the screen. I can’t remember how long we were glued to our TV. At some point, we walked down to the Hudson and out onto Pier 1 at West 70th Street and watched the huge clouds of smoke billowing out over the river. It was the most beautiful, blue-skied sparkling September day, everyone around us was standing in the same position, hands over their mouths or on their heads in disbelief. I remember when the wind shifted and suddenly we could smell the acrid smoke of burning electricals, a smell that still brings it all right back to me – in a visceral instant.

The bridges and tunnels were closed at 9.21 am, we were all trapped on the island and had no idea what was going to happen next. The airspace was also closed – with America-bound planes famously being forced to land in Gander, Newfoundland – except for the F-15 fighter jets that were patrolling the skies over Manhattan. The entire city came to a standstill with hundreds of thousands of people walking the streets trying to find their way home. I made an escape plan. Should things get worse, I was going to jump over the fence at the 79th Street Boat Basin, pull-start one of the many dinghies moored at the docks, cross over to New Jersey and head north to Canada. Thanks to my summers spent on Georgian Bay, I knew I could handle just about any boat. 

Somehow, we got in touch with our friends, most of whom lived downtown. A group of us met at my friend Dave’s apartment on 14th Street – to go any further south, you had to prove you had an apartment downtown. We needed to be together and Dave’s place became our HQ as we shared that evolving, devolving day. On my journey down there, I saw firefighter heading Uptown, away from the towers. These heroes were covered in dust, absolutely grey except for their eyes and swipes around their mouths and noses. They were utterly exhausted, shoulders slumped, their eyes empty with shock. The streets were full of people walking, some covered in dust from the collapsed towers, looking bewildered in their suits and work clothes.

I called Vanessa, who was staying at the Soho Grand on Canal Street, and told her to come and stay with me. She said she felt she couldn’t leave her editor-in-chief, Jo Elvin. They stayed at the hotel for a few more days until it ran out of food and then they dragged their suitcases over 30 blocks uptown to The Morgan on Madison Avenue – there were no taxis or cars available. Vanessa remembers she had a meeting with a photographer that fateful morning, “And the strangest thing is, I had the meeting while the towers were on fire, it was really surreal, and then I had a meeting with a model agent – I walked outside the hotel and then the tower came down. It was like Armageddon, a tunnel of grey dust and people running towards me, and then they pulled people into Soho Grand, like it was a refuge. It was so surreal.”

Miraculously, I didn’t know anyone in the towers, even though the guarantor on my lease worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm based on floors 101 to 105 in the North Tower, directly above the impact zone that suffered the largest loss of life of any single organization with 658 employees killed. My younger brother Nicholas was supposed to be at a conference in the towers that morning. He worked in finance in L.A. and we hadn’t seen each other for six months, the longest we’d ever been apart in our lives. His plan was to fly into New York on the Friday afternoon, spend the weekend with me and then attend the conference at the World Trade Centre on Monday and Tuesday – it was a quasi excuse for him. At the last minute, his company gave him a box at the Rose Bowl, which was being held on the 11th. We both decided we’d make our own time to see each other without trying to wedge it into our work. “I had never been to the Rose Bowl, I was just starting out in my job, didn’t have much money and owed a lot of friends a treat for their kindness to me in L.A.,” he remembers. “I called you and we ummed and ahhed before I decided to cancel. I don’t think I would have made it out alive. Saved by the Bowl!” The best decision we ever made.

By the next day, the city began to be plastered with flyers of the missing, stuck to trees, lampposts, subway railings, each one a story, a family experiencing a devastating, inexplicable loss. Their loved ones, like me, had just got up to go to work that morning, on the most beautiful day in September. Being New York, we were all back at work by the 13th or 14th. In fact our mayor, Rudy Giuliani, urged us to go back and return the city “to normal.” I also remember the cough almost everyone at Jane had developed, as many of those who lived downtown had been breathing in all of the ash and smoke for days. I had a photo shoot the following week and, while I was on set, the Fairchild offices were evacuated due to a bomb threat. I told my co-workers to get used to it, I had grown up in London during the IRA and bombs and bomb threats were part of my norm. Then, a week later, the anthrax attacks happened, targeting the media. Suddenly, we were all scared of the mail on top of everything else, opening letters and packages while wearing protective gloves. 

I had a great friend who lived on Wall Street and had a huge roof terrace. When they finally let him back down, we all went and helped clean the reams of office paper piled in drifts on his terrace. It felt so pointless and hollow, all those people dying at their desks, all these now meaningless pieces of paper drifting. 

That weekend, we finally managed to leave the city and go to the beach shacks my group of 20-something friends had rented in Quogue on Long Island – the feeling of release as we left the city behind us, the serene beauty and infinite rhythm of the waves breaking on the shore. We all sat, staring at the sea, trying to process what had happened. When my friend Robin (a fellow Canadian) arrived, she ran towards me with her arms out and tears pouring down her face and we held each other in a long hug. It seemed unbelievable we were there, that we had come out unscathed. Twenty-four Canadians died in the towers along with 67 British; in fact, of the 2,977 victims, an estimated 372 were foreign nationals. The 9/11 attacks had affected the entire world, not just the U.S.

Everything changed that day. The incredible high that New York had been on during the Giuliani years – plunging crime rates and a huge rise in quality of life – came to an end. The attack seemed to shift the city’s economy, attitudes changed and words like “un-American” and “Homeland Security” became part of the lexicon. So many of us left New York; I went to Austin, Texas six months later, and then back to the U.K. (just in time for the July 7, 2005 bombings in London). 

Despite all of us moving cities and countries, I have stayed close to that core group of girlfriends, and every September 11 one of us sends a group text. Remember? It feels like a moment to remember, not only of those who died but what died that day as well. 

Weirdly, the magazine company I went to New York for, and returned to England to work at, Condé Nast, ended up moving into 1 World Trade Center in 2014. I had never gone back down to the area of the towers after 9/11, it felt voyeuristic somehow, the thought of all those people dying right there. My first visit to the site was on a return trip to New York when I went to have coffee with my mentor, Jane Larkworthy, the beauty director at W whose position I had filled at Jane – sadly she died of breast cancer last year. Everything was glittering and new, business-like and efficient: New York had reincarnated itself again.