Welcome to the Culture Lounge podcast, a curated sonic experience that carries on the Assouline legacy of joining tastemakers and visionaries shaping culture. This week's fashion theme joins Linda Fargo, the director of women's fashion and store presentation at Bergdorf Goodman, and Alina Cho, an Emmy-award-winning journalist, CFDA award-winner, and former CNN national correspondent. As Fargo and Cho remember their formative years in the fashion industry, take a trip down memory lane with the two icons as they share their favorite runway shows, treasured looks, and the designers they're most excited about.
On How They Started Their Fashion Careers
Fargo: The beginning of my interest in fashion was really more about costume and really the transformative quality of getting into costume. And I don't think it was until I moved to New York, and I started pressing my face up to the windows – Bergdorf's, Bendel’s, Bloomingdales – that I started to kind of peer into these worlds of fashion, which was something entirely different, really, than costume itself.
Cho: I landed at CNN in 2004, and it was only then that I was encouraged to pitch stories. So, I started pitching stories on fashion, always with an eye toward will this play for a mass audience. And I like to say I started backstage live at the Oscar de la Renta and Carolina Herrera shows in New York, and it morphed into half hour specials on New York Fashion Week, but also on Paris couture. And it really was the start of me covering fashion for a mass audience.
On Their Favorite Fashion Shows
Cho: One that really sticks out in my mind was when Raf Simons made his debut at Dior. It was couture and the walls were lined with fresh flowers and each room was a different color of flower. And I just remember thinking, and particularly at a house like Dior, which is steeped in so much history, you're witnessing a moment in fashion history.
Fargo: There was a show I loved and remembered was from Dries Van Noten. We were seated at a banquet table, a very, very long banquet table. And the girls actually walked right down the center of the banquet table.
On Their Favorite Looks
Cho: There was a dress that I had been eyeing – I am not kidding you – for 7 or 8 months that I desperately wanted. It was a classic black Chanel lace and velvet dress, but I loved it. And I loved the way I felt in it. I loved the way I looked in it."
Fargo: For the 2013 Met Gala I went to the East Village and I had a dominatrix make me this rubber, rubber dress, and I wore, like, faux barbed wire in my hair.