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What do you do after you’ve been at a company for two decades and practically run the place? If you’re Bergdorf Goodman’s Linda Fargo, you get your own store. “I hit my 20-year mark at Bergdorf this year. This was like, instead of the watch, I got a store,” she said before cutting the ribbon to her new shop-in-shop on the department store’s fourth floor last night.
“I wanted this to be a place that people would maybe just hang out, with no pressure to buy anything if they wanted to just be there,” she says. “We keep talking about experience; how do we make people actually want to go and be somewhere, instead of just laying in bed at two in the morning and shopping online?”
The shop, called Linda’s, includes everything from clothing (Prabal Gurung, Brandon Maxwell, Sacai, and plenty more) to vintage accessories to her favorite hostess gift (truffled almonds). Merchandise will be in season (“We’re not going to do shearling and double-faced cashmere in the spring”) and change frequently.
So, what do you buy first when you own the joint? “I can tell you exactly — I know exactly what it was. It was the Gucci bubblegum pink Modern Future Wool Coat. It was from spring, and it always stayed on my mind. It really hadn’t been ordered, so I asked them if they could keep it alive for me. That was my first purchase.”