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by GINIA BELLAFANTE

On Thursday morning Alexandra Hamilton, a fashion industry publicist, ascended a set of subway stairs at Times Square to return, begrudgingly, to her job on Seventh Avenue. Like so many New Yorkers whose work could provide no immediate contribution to the relief effort, the questions on her mind were existential: How can I do what I do? What does it matter? How, she wondered, would anyone be able to sit blithely at a fashion show ever again?

Beyond combating feelings of irrelevance, those employed in fashion are coming to terms with the fact that business, in many ways, cannot continue as usual. If mounting $300,000 runway shows and staging even costlier parties with the arrival of every new perfume seemed perverse before, they seem sacrilegious to many now, when thousands are missing and presumed dead in the World Trade Center disaster.

"The musical chairs in the front row, the sunglasses, the jaded expressions, it was already seeming so outdated," said the designer John Bartlett. "Now it seems to belong completely to some other time."

Of immediate concern to editors and buyers is the matter of the European shows, which began on Sunday in London, albeit with the cancellations of major shows by Burberry, Nicole Farhi and Clements Ribeiro. Many in the American press and retail worlds are skipping the London shows and remain wary about attending shows in Milan, which are scheduled to begin Sept. 22, and in Paris, which are to start

Oct. 5.

"Watching fashion shows and sitting in the audience seems not the thing to do," said Julie Gilhart, the fashion director of Barneys New York, who is wavering over whether to attend the European collections. "We need to be reflective of the new collective mood. I don't want to be in Europe; I want to be here for friends and for any opportunity I have to help. We need to challenge designers to creatively address how they can show us clothes in different ways."

But even if designers do manage to show more economically and inventively during the remainder of the spring 2002 collections, a larger issue is at hand: will men and women want to shop in the crucial months ahead for the retail industry? An economy that was already sluggish and consumer confidence that was already depleted had retailers in a bind before the events of last week.

"This is going to be a climate of `shop for what you have to have,' " said Arnold Aronson, the managing director for retail strategies at Kurt Salmon Associates and a former chief executive of Saks Fifth Avenue. " `Want' is less clear under these circumstances."

Mr. Aronson spent the past few days walking through stores and discovered that many people did not heed Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's plea to New Yorkers to help revitalize the local economy by shopping. "I've been through stores and they're empty," he said. "I don't think you could find people stealing at this point. I think there is guilt associated with personal conspicuous consumption."

Kal Ruttenstein, the fashion director at Bloomingdale's, echoed many other merchants when he said it was still too soon to tell how severely retailers might be affected over the next few months.

"Some days weren't as bad as you'd think, and some days were terrible," Mr. Ruttenstein said of the shopping activity last week in Bloomingdale's. The pervasive sense of fear and anxiety that people must now live with will keep many of them from wanting to enter big crowded stores, Mr. Ruttenstein added.

Many store executives also feel that the way they communicate with consumers might undergo certain shifts. "What is the appropriate way to conduct business?" Ronald L. Frasch, the president of Bergdorf Goodman, said. "How do you balance the social obligations you have as a store executive with the commercial obligations? Do we call up our customers about in-store events?"

Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys New York, emphasized, along with others, that service will take on unprecedented importance in the new climate. "Everything about coming into a store is going to have to be uplifting - the way people are greeted when they come in," Mr. Doonan said. "We can't have sales people in urban flight mode."

Mr. Aronson said stores will have to work hard to retain the customers they have attracted. "Making low price the compelling selling proposition isn't necessarily going to work," he said. "I think there will have to be a greater effort on the part of stores toward more human outreach."

Part of that would ostensibly come from advertising campaigns and promotions that might speak more feelingly to the public than they have in the past. "There's definitely going to be a more questioning aesthetic," said Mr. Doonan, who is currently working on the store's Christmas windows. "Everything has to frame the world in a positive way. Irony has to be handled with kid gloves.I think you see immediately now if something is inappropriate or not - it screams off the page."

Mr. Doonan said the the "Ab-Fab" aspect of fashion, its campy irreverence, is "totally inappropriate now."

Ed Burstell, the vice president and general manager of Bendel's, said he planned to walk through his store yesterday afternoon and remove any clothes that seemed inappropriate - distressed fabrics, for example, that might suggest the ash-covered refugees fleeing uptown after last Tuesday's attacks.

Of great interest to all who follow fashion is how an altered world will affect the way designers think about clothes. Will the references to late-20th-century culture, so often arbitrary, continue unabated? "The business of fashion obviously will go on," said Josh Patner, a partner in the Tuleh design team. "People can't ignore the economic weight of it. But it's a bigger challenge for fashion."

"Fashion has gotten so far away from itself," he continued. "It's all rehash and showmanship. Fashion has not necessarily benefited from its overexposure in the popular culture. In 25 or 50 years, will people look at this as an era of spectacular clothing? No. They'll think of it as an era of spectacle."