A fashion week like no other

This piece in the Times today brought it all back.

I was wearing stilettos with a Velcro ankle strap -- which would be an important detail as the morning unfolded on Sept. 11, 2001. Dressed for a long day of covering fashion shows in NYC, I was sipping a cappuccino before my 9 a.m. start, marveling at the bright blue sky with fluffy clouds and replaying the previous night in my mind: Marc Jacobs had thrown a fashion show and after-party of Biblical proportions. Bowls of sugared fruit, celebrities, music, perfumed air. A call to my cell phone halted the memory. It was my mother telling me about the first plane.  I hung up and, as a journalist, instinctively headed to the World Trade Center. Without changing my shoes or my skinny Helmut Lang pants, I jumped in a cab, which drove me a short distance south but then refused go further saying we were "under attack" and he was leaving town. I got on the subway, at that moment still operational, emerged from the station and ran toward what had since become two burning towers. Standing in front of City Hall, waiting for traffic to pass so I could keep going, a police officer pushed me and told me to run -- the other way. A needed dose of reality. At that moment, the first collapse had begun and the all-encompassing smoke and rubble filled the air. I thought the tower was taking everything down with it -- like dominoes. So I tried to run down the middle of the street, as far as possible from any other structure. But I was unable to pause to undo the ankle strap in the stampede. I had a moment of black humor. They can put "fashion victim" on my tombstone.

I ran 14 blocks without stopping. I filled my notebook with interviews of people who had escaped death by one floor. And then I ran back for more. Half way there, the second tower fell. Adrenaline wearing off, insanity setting in, I turned on my heels once more to flee. For good.

The next day, on the very spot where Marc Jacobs held a party that would seem uncouth any time after 9/11, rescuers had transformed the space into a morgue.

I threw away the shoes, caked in grief. The classic pants still fit (thankfully), but I wear them infrequently due to the negative connotations. Any morning with a bright blue sky, low humidity and fluffy white clouds is, and always will be for me, a Sept. 11 morning -- the morning before all the bad stuff happened.

What a doll

My mother surprised me with a little gag gift -- a Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy action figure, still in the box!  The doll, dressed in an ensemble that Jackie wore to India, talks when you press a button on her back. She has a 19-phrase repertoire, saying such brilliant things as, "I am Mrs. Jack Kennedy" and "Well, I must say, I don't think there's very much time for socializing."

There are a few other chestnuts: "When I was first married our life was almost as hectic as it is now, and I found it rather hard to adjust. But now I think politics is one of the most rewarding lives a woman can have -- to be married to a politician."

She also says a few words in Spanish, having campaigned for her husband in that language a few times. The voice sounds like an authentic recordings of hers, but, alas, her stockings are baggy and her bouffant bob is plastic.

Thanks, Mom!

An unforgettable lunch with Jackie O

The array of vacation reading on the coffee table made me chuckle this morning. Next to Caroline Knapp's Drinking: A Love Story is Jason Epstein's book Eating: A Memoir. That about sums up the week. My husband brought both titles along, as I read them long ago. In fact, Epstein signed the copy for me when I interviewed him in his SoHo apartment's kitchen in January of 2010 as part of the research for my book on Jacqueline Onassis.

In 1975, Jackie asked Epstein, then editorial director at Random House, to lunch at Lutece; they ordered shad roe (the recipe for which is included in Eating).

"She asked if there was a job for her at Random House," Epstein recalled. "She wanted to be an editor."

I'll save the rest of the story for my book, but tonight I should try the bouillabaisse recipe that Epstein also includes, inspired by the Alice Waters cookbooks Epstein published.

What's inside Jackie's head?

Vacationing on Cape Cod, home to the Kennedys, means stumbling upon lots of related relics at antique stores: campaign posters, maps with the president's face superimposed near the site of the Hyannisport compound, and this -- a head vase of Jackie in funeral attire. If you squint, you can see the $900 price tag.

An architectural legacy

We are staying in Barnstable, a historic village in the crease of Cape Cod's elbow, at what was once a shack on a cliff. But the house, built in the 19th Century, was transformed decades ago by the late Cambridge architect Ben Thompson, whose magic hand also redesigned Boston's Faneuil Hall Marketplace, New York's South Street Market and Miami's Bayside. In addition to being a visionary architect who promoted walkability, he founded Design Research in 1953 and its flagship store in Harvard Square, in the late 1960s. The design shop, the prescursor to Crate & Barrel, imported Marimekko (still on the beds and pillows here) and clean-lined housewares (whites dishes, cups and bowls on the open shelves in this kitchen that their friend and neighbor Julia Child cooked in), as well as modern furniture by the likes of Alvar Aalto (chairs in the living room from which to view Sandy Neck through an enormous window). Ben's legacy, chronicled in a gorgeous book his wife, Jane, released earlier this year, is evident to the thousands of people who pass through his public buildings every day. We feel lucky to understand and experience his design choices on a residential level. Like any good preservationist -- Jacqueline Onassis included -- he understood that the past is worth keeping, and making relevant. And that good architecture promotes joy and social life. Certainly the hallmarks of a good vacation.

Jackie's simple beauty product?

I'm on vacation in Vermont and between reading chapters of Cleopatra -- I take issue with the book's claim that she was THE most intriguing woman in the world -- we headed over to the Vermont Country Store, where I was preoccupied with the Bozo the Clown punching bag as retail therapy. So I missed seeing this beauty product -- claiming to be "Jackie Kennedy's almond oil" -- until I got back to the house and perused the catalog. Perhaps I'll get some of this skin treatment today in the name of research.

Jackie's Halston dress

A few months ago, when I was mostly done with my manuscript, I was in Washington, D.C. on an unrelated work trip. In my spare time, I walked Jackie's old stomping grounds -- the White House, Lafayette Square and Georgetown, where she and Jack had lived on N Street.  I got sucked into a boutique; it happens quite easily, actually. I realized this was the first time that I had time to shop -- outside the grocery store -- in what might have been two years. One of the first things I saw on the rack was a pale salmon-colored silk shirt dress. The color grabbed me. The fabric seduced me. When I pulled it off the rack to have a closer look, the saleswoman mentioned that it was Halston Heritage, a reprise line that Sarah Jessica Parker was working on. This was a dress SJP had worn in one of the Sex and the City films. What the clerk did not say -- but what I was fairly certain about -- was that this was the same dress, in a different fabric, that Jackie had worn to a press conference to save Grand Central Terminal in New York in 1975.

Of course I bought it.



Yesterday, I was reading this month's issue of Vogue and saw that SJP is no longer working on the Halston Heritage line. It was fun while it lasted.