By Christine Muhlke

October 7, 2001 | 8:00 p.m

On Thursday, Sept. 27, lines were forming in New York stores, but

they were on the other side of the cash register. At the cavernous Hermès store on Madison Avenue and 62nd Street, a saleswoman was propping herself up on a cash register, bored. At Prada on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, an employee was listlessly petting a fur stole. Over at Barneys, three salespeople in the designer-shoe department were leaning against a display, looking lonely. "It was really, really slow for the first week-God!" said a saleswoman at Prada, who wished to remain anonymous. Her eyes swept across the sales floor, which was empty save for overdressed actress Brittany Murphy, who was asking if she could pay for a pile of clothes with a check, as four Prada employees fawned around her. "Then, starting last Saturday, it picked up," the saleswoman said. "Little by little, every day is better. Kind of." As if fall sales weren't slow enough, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 shook the foundations of the city's retail industry. Fearful of recession, shoppers stayed home, sending the nationwide consumer-confidence index down in its biggest tumble since the Gulf War. "It's a debacle," said Howard Davidowitz, chairman of Davidowitz & Associates Inc., a New York–based retail consulting firm. " Everything is in a funk, from Duane Reade to Bergdorf Goodman. The department stores are going to have to change their operating plans, reduce inventory and help and lower prices, because expectations are lower. So much of Madison Avenue sells things you buy to go to parties, but no one feels like going to a party anymore. That's going to impact jewelry, couture and designer businesses. Business was not good to begin with, but now it went off a cliff." He added that he was confident New York retailers would bounce back in time. New Yorkers have also been forced to radically reassess their personal relationship with fashion. While fashion has always been a love-hate affair, its ability to arouse passion and consume paychecks suddenly seems suspect to even its most ardent practitioners. "It's just not the same," said Carrie Ellen Phillips, a 25-year-old partner in the fashion public-relations firm of Bismarck Communications. "I went to Kirna Zabête, where I would have mortgaged a small house before, but I couldn't even get interested. I almost felt bad shopping, like, 'You should be doing something better with your time. Is this what you're spending your money on?'" Ms. Phillips and her roommate cleaned out their closets and donated clothes to the Red Cross center near their West Village apartment. "I don't have to have the 'thing of the moment' anymore," she said, sounding slightly incredulous. On the day before the W.T.C. attacks, Liz Morgan Welch, a 32-year-old freelance writer, took a break from a story she was writing about shopaholics for Mademoiselle  magazine to splurge on a $500 Tracy Feith dress for a wedding she was to attend that weekend. The next day, she said, "I literally wanted to flush it down the toilet. It just didn't matter . And it's persisted, that feeling …. My Tracy Feith dress could have fed a fireman's family for a month. And I can't forgive myself." (Meanwhile, Mademoiselle announced on Oct. 1 that it would be folding.) Reexamining their shopping habits-the fact that it had become normal for some to pay $970 for a pair of Jimmy Choo boots and join a waiting list for $1,500 cotton peasant blouses at Yves Saint Laurent-many women are overcome by guilt. Ms. Welch, who said she nearly dressed her way into debt as an assistant at Vanity Fair four years ago, was cured overnight of her taste for Prada shoes. "I'm still in the place where shopping feels disrespectful," she said. "I was in Starbucks on the Upper East Side last week, and there were these women in jewels talking about the cute shoes they'd just bought. I wanted to dump a latte on their heads." One of the first signs of trouble in the racks was a Sept. 20 Women's Wear Daily article which reported that Bergdorf Goodman had canceled its remaining portion of fall orders, with the exception of special orders. (Bergdorf Goodman spokespeople did not return calls by press time.) Saks Fifth Avenue projects that sales for its Manhattan flagship store, which accounts for 17 percent of the chain's sales, will be down approximately 30 percent for September. Asked if Saks is canceling remaining fall orders, spokeswoman Lori Rhodes said, "Canceling orders is a natural part of business. We're monitoring the New York situation very closely." Sales at the Manhattan flagships of Bloomingdale's and Macy's are estimated to be down 15 to 20 percent for September. Asked about Barneys' sales, store publicist Dawn Brown said some days had been strong, others less so. "This store reflects the mood within the city: It fluctuates," she said. On the day after the attacks, Barneys actually did relatively brisk business, selling to stranded tourists and fashion press who were in town for Fashion Week. (Barneys salespeople had the added stress of a bomb threat, which emptied the building during the week after the attack; it turned out to be groundless.) Strangely enough, store buyers must now think spring. Bergdorf and Saks did not send buyers to the European collections, while Barneys sent considerably fewer staff. Just as Republicans and Democrats are being forced to work together in Congress, the stores, designers and suppliers will have to come together and pool their resources. "These stores will have to work with manufacturers to develop a strategy where no one party takes all the pain," said Arnold Aronson, managing director of retail strategies at Kurt Salmon Associates. "Value-concept stores like Wal-Mart will fare best, while luxury stores got hit harder, because it's hard to combine grief and mourning with going out and making conspicuous-consumption purchases." But some are trying, takingMayorRudolph Giuliani up on his suggestion that shopping in a time of crisis is every New Yorker's patriotic duty. "When he said to support the city, I thought, 'I'll do what I can: I'll get some fall clothes,'" said Stacy Nathan, a 31-year-old vice president for advertising sales for Nickelodeon Online. "You want to be helpful, dumping money back into New York. I live in Tribeca-I go home to it every day. I want some bright spot in the day. I'm a little depressed, and shopping-not that it makes me happy, but I like it. It's worked for the time being." "People come in here and say, 'I'm going to do the patriotic thing and go shopping,'" said Anna Kimtz, co-owner of Hedra Prue, a Mott Street boutique. Kim France, editor in chief of the Condé Nast shopping magazine Lucky , said that while the Mayor's exhortation was powerful-"If he told them to jump on one foot right now, they'd do it"-it might not translate. "As for the whole Sex and the City status-shopping moment, it's a tough thing to swing right now," she said. Ms. France added that empty stores would impact not just the designers but also the city's economy. "Shopping is seen as girlie Trivial Pursuit," she said. "But right now, it's not trivial, it's primary." Retailers are actively trying to bring status shoppers back, using charity donations as bait. On Sept. 28, Diane von Furstenberg opened her West 12th Street studio for a one-day sample sale, which raised $50,000, proceeds of which went to the Children's Aid Society, which has established its own Sept. 11 fund. "If it hadn't been for charity, we wouldn't have had as many people," said Maureen Cahill, the design company's director of marketing. "People bought more because they wanted to help out." Designer Nicole Miller helped organize "Pump Up Prince Street," a block party for local merchants on Saturday, Sept. 29. Outside her store, an impromptu fashion shoot was taking place, with store employees and models "donated" from the Wilhelmina agency prancing to a D.J. "We're busy today, actually," said Nicole Miller store manager Demi Mouyiaris. "It's been sad-pathetic! People think 14th Street and below is like a war zone." As she spoke, proprietors of nearby restaurants and stores stood in their doorways, staring blankly into the street as neighborhood kids hung the pictures they'd painted on butcher paper on every available surface. Around the corner on Wooster Street, Patagonia had set up a tent with a band and vendors from the Union Square Greenmarket selling "Apples for the Big Apple." Those who do venture out are finding a full range of fall fashions to choose from; little was bought before Sept. 11, and thousands of cartons of European clothing were stuck in customs until recently. After being evacuated from her office following a bomb scare in the Condé Nast building on Sept. 13, Glamour editor Alexandra Marshall said she was feeling "disconnected." So she went home, got online and ordered a pair of J. Crew jeans and some used Manolo Blahniks. Asked how she felt, she laughed: "I felt … really glad to have scored those shoes for a wedding in Italy! It had me thinking ahead: You fantasize about an item, and it takes you out of your reality. I was just the girl with the perfect jeans-not just the girl slugging through the misery of New York City." But the fashion-as-cure philosophy is wearing a bit thin with some New York shoppers. "I realized I don't need it, I don't want it, it can't improve my life right now," said  Christine Shea, a 31-year-old freelance beauty writer and former editor at Vogue and Harper's Bazaar , who related a surreal trip she took with friends to the Michel Perry shoe store on Sept. 22, where women "talked about which 9/11 fund to donate to, and going online to liberty-unites.org while deciding whether or not they should buy these 'classic' $350 black pumps. They did." Donating one's clothing allowance to one of the various disaster-relief funds seems to help some feel better. Others, like Ms. Phillips, are editing their closets for the cause (though it's doubtful that rescue workers need a laser-cut leather McQueen dress). Some are doing it for profit: Medea Juhasz, the manager of Ina, a designer consignment store on Prince Street, said they are booked solid for the next two weeks as women look to offload their excess bags. "People are starting to get rid of things; it makes them feel better," she said. "We have one rich person who said, 'I feel really guilty. I have so much I don't need.'" Of course, there's little chance that New York will become a city of people attired in Gap and track suits-fashion is a vital part of how New Yorkers announce who they are, and any abandonment of the higher reaches of fashion is a temporary reaction. The closets that are being earnestly cleaned out will eventually be filled again. If anything, the changed mood now engulfing the city will find its way into fashion, to be repackaged and sold back to us at a mark-up next fall. In the meantime, fashionistas and shopaholics are finding new ways to fill the void. "Before, talking about shopping was a way to bond," said Ms. Marshall. "Now there are more genuine ways of bonding. People are more open and genuine." She said she was rethinking her trip to Italy. "My friends' wedding is 20 minutes from the Gucci outlet," she said. "Before, there were visions of double G's dancing in my head. Now I want to experience being in a foreign country. I don't want to go there and just get lots of tote bags."  - With additional reporting by Tom McGeveran