ACE Award Winner Linda Fargo
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Linda Fargo: The Brilliant Renegade
By Lynn Yeager
“I am as happy wearing a rubber insect that I dipped in black glitter as I am wearing a proper baroque pearl earring,” declared Linda Fargo, senior vice president, fashion and store presentation director at Bergdorf Goodman, describing her unpretentious, deeply imaginative take on the art of dressing. Fargo is this year’s recipient of the Style Icon ACE Award, and indeed, her instantly recognizable elegance — platinum bob, scarlet lips, and chic joyous ensembles are, well, uniquely Linda.
“I have a very wide range of styles. I can like the simplest thing, the white shirt look, but you will also find me in gold brocade. I run the gamut, from understated to over the top.” All of these notions, and so much more, can be found at the eponymous Linda’s, a Fargo-curated boutique — she has called it a “fantasy closet”— on Bergdorf’s fourth floor, where her enthusiasms have ruled the racks for seven years.
We are having tea today in the BG restaurant, and she is dressed for the driving rainstorm outside in a Sacai jacket that is half plush faux leopard and, of course, she is wearing matching leopard-printed shortie-boots — the whole outfit could have been built around these. “An accessory by definition is supposed to be the supporting character, but I am happy to reverse that. I think accessories are that important, and they can make that much of a difference.” Please consider: this is a woman who once attended the Met Ball in a rubber dress she had custom made by a dominatrix in the East Village, to which she added “this phenomenal DIY cross, decorated with chains, safety pins, pearls — huge, three feet across. Then I teased my hair up, and I got silver rubber barbed wire and twisted it in. For me, an accessory doesn’t have to be a piece of Verdura —I ’d love it, don’t get me wrong — but sometimes a five-foot piece of rubber barbed wire is just what the outfit needs.”
Fargo grew up in the Midwest, and her talent showed early. “I loved crafts. I could make something out of nothing, and that kind of stayed with me. A refrigerator box became a castle.” When she was in high school she came across a brochure for Parsons School of Design, with a model on the cover wearing an outfit made from Ticonderoga pencils. “I thought, I need to go to the part of the world where they make things like that!”
She didn’t attend Parsons, but she remained besotted with the dream of New York. As soon as she finished college, she and a girlfriend loaded up their belongings and headed to Manhattan. “Her bird was on my lap, her dog on my shoulder. We came across the 59th Street bridge and I saw Oz before me. I think I had $1000 in my pocket.”
Fargo got a job at Macy’s and climbed the ladder, eventually becoming the store’s visual director. There were a few more professional stops, and then she took a step that, looking back, she admits was beyond bold. “I really wanted my work to be about retail theater, so I came knocking on the door at Bergdorf’s. I sent them renderings of ideas for windows and in-store events — ‘If you hire me, this is what your store could look like.’” In the days before computers, she employed an X-acto knife, building little models to illustrate her vision. Then she dropped the whole package in a mailbox. She immediately had second thoughts. “I thought I was too presumptuous,” and she even tried to fish it out of the box, but it was too late. “Anyway, they called me in.”
Read the rest of the article in our ACE issue of Ac Magazine HERE.