Like many people, Brooks Brothers creative director Michael Bastian remembers exactly where he was on the morning of September 11, 2001.
“9/11 is personal for me,” he told Business Insider during New York Fashion Week on Thursday as Brooks Brothers presented its Spring/Summer 2027 collection. “I was in the air on 9/11. I was flying back from a trade show in Paris. I was working at Bergdorf Goodman at the time. And I ended up in Nova Scotia in Halifax, Canada.”
After hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a full national ground stop, shutting US airspace for the first time in history.
It took Bastian four days to get back home to a New York City that was no longer recognizable.
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“It really changed everyone’s life,” Bastian, who joined Brooks Brothers as creative director in 2020, said.
Brooks Brothers, a 208-year-old menswear brand founded by Henry Sands Brooks in New York City, is also part of the history of that terrible day and the recovery efforts that followed.
In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, a Brooks Brothers store, located next to the World Trade Center at One Liberty Plaza, served a different, tragic purpose: a makeshift morgue.
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Once a place where job candidates deliberated over ties ahead of interviews in the Twin Towers, the men’s shirt department at Brooks Brothers transformed into a holding area for bodies — and body parts — pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center. Victims’ remains were held there until they could be moved to New York City’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for identification.
The Brooks Brothers location at One Liberty Plaza sustained heavy damage when the Twin Towers collapsed, but reopened exactly one year after the attacks. While the store is no longer there — it closed in 2018 amid planned renovations and relocated a few blocks away — the memories stay with Bastian 25 years later.
“I still can’t look at the pictures,” he said. “If you were here, it really affected you, as a New Yorker, as an American.”
