Linda Fargo began her fashion career not by design but by accident. She grew up in Wisconsin as an art student devoted to found objects and assemblage, dreaming only of reaching New York. Her first job came at Macy's display department, where she arrived to her interview in a vintage 1940s skirt suit after taking the wrong subway and ending up in Brooklyn.
Within four years, by 1984, Fargo became Macy's window director. The store stocked designer labels including Matsuda, Kansai Yamamoto, Claude Montana, and Armani. Fargo designed thousands of windows over her time there, treating each display like a real-world version of the glass-enclosed worlds she had built in art school. She changed the windows weekly and worked late into the night. One Richard Tyler window filled with smoke from a rented Canal Street smoke machine forced her and her staff inside; they wrote "HELP" on the glass before escaping as the fog filled the store.
At 30, Fargo left Macy's as VP of visual. She took a position at I. Magnin in San Francisco, described as the West Coast Bergdorf Goodman, but the store went bankrupt about a year and a half later. She then joined The Gap, where Mickey Drexler was CEO, but concluded she did not love working at that scale with 850 stores.
In 1996, Fargo cold-called Bergdorf Goodman, mailed a portfolio of ideas, and was hired as visual director by then-president Dawn Mello. She began changing the window approach from one designer across the entire street to displays featuring multiple brands and characters, showing designers like Mary McFadden and Mugler together. In 2006, Jim Gold, then president of Bergdorf, offered her the women's fashion office after Robert Burke departed to start his own firm.
Fargo estimates she has attended 5,000 fashion shows throughout her career at Bergdorf.