Bergdorf Goodman’s Linda Fargo Wants You to Try on a Different Side of Yourself
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Surrealism, Brutalism, and midcentury modernism walk into a dressing room…while this might sound like the buildup to a particularly design-forward joke, it’s anything but. It’s a recipe of sorts for the new Linda’s at Bergdorf Goodman, a shop on the fourth floor of New York City’s most exclusive department store from its fashion director, Linda Fargo.
Fargo—an industry icon known for her unabashed embrace of pattern, devastating side part, and red lips—first debuted her shop in 2017 in a smaller room on the same floor. This year, working alongside vice president of store design and visual Susan Homan, she doubled the store-within-a-store’s footprint to reflect a “greater vision” of what Bergdorf Goodman is.
Fargo describes the new space as a series of salons that allow her to tell “a lot of stories.” In a world that’s increasingly defined by curated feeds and specialized discovery funnels, Linda’s is a playground, a forum for emerging talents to mix with the more established, where uptown meets downtown. (In a nutshell: where you can shop for Luar alongside Olympia Le Tan.) “There’s a very blurry line between my personal life and my professional life,” Fargo says, pointing out, for example, a wall-spanning lacquered red screen that came out of her own apartment. “I’d say the litmus test for what makes it in here are things with personality. And that’s not a strategy, it’s just natural to me.”
The overarching palette is black and ivory, a Fargo signature, mixed with pops of red and warm gold tones. There are sentimental touches—a cabinet that previously belonged to Alber Elbaz, when he was at Lanvin; a wallpaper in the fitting room made from digitally scanned runway-show invitations Fargo has received over the years—alongside the occasional snake or flamingo, as Fargo loves a good animal motif.
Clothes hang from “semi-Giacometti” style racks while repurposed metal cases—sides newly outfitted with perforated aged-bronze paneling—create what can only be described as a bohemian-by-way-of-Bauhaus backdrop for perusing accessories and jewelry. “Things live with us,” says Fargo, who routinely sources and reinterprets furnishings and decor from Bergdorf’s warehouse of inventory. “It’s like when you’re making a home, you mix something you already own with something new. You have to revitalize your eye.”
Fargo has an affinity for materials with heft to ground the flights of fancy encouraged by the “star of the show”—the fashion—as well as European midcentury design classics, a mix that can be found throughout the store, from an expressive Hervé Van der Straeten mirror that hangs above one ground-level entrance to the Serge Mouille flame sconces in the private appointment salon. “I want fashion to feel fun,” Fargo says over a cup of Mariage Frères tea, served in Ginori porcelain. “It can be a little intimidating, but my team here is very gentle about saying ‘Have you seen this?’ People will try on a different side of themselves.”
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