16Arlington’s Marco Capaldo on Grief and the Future
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If there is a woman who is young and beautiful and shaping the culture in some way, chances are you’ve seen her wearing 16Arlington. It has become, in seven years, the maker of the “it girl” uniform, with women like Paloma Elsesser, Kendall Jenner, Adwoa Aboah, Amal Clooney, Alexa Chung, Shygirl, Hailey Bieber, Zendaya, and more filling feeds around the world with pictures of dresses that are slinky and sequined, or sometimes lined with feathers and tailored with plunging necklines or micro-mini hems.
The man behind 16Arlington is 30-year-old London native Marco Capaldo, who has been independently directing the brand since the sudden death of his partner in life and business, Federica ‘Kikka’ Cavenati, in 2021. Capaldo and Cavenati met at the Italian fashion school Istituto Marangoni and relocated to a flat on Arlington Street in London after graduation. There, they developed what would become their signature aesthetic: clothes that married a young girl’s sense of costume chest glamor–feathers, sequins, satin, faux fur–with elements of a professional woman’s closet– sleek silhouettes, pointed collars, and button-up shirts.
In those early days, friends would drop by the flat for an outfit to wear for a night out before returning them the next day, resulting in 16Arlington’s self-proclaimed tagline, ‘clothes with stories to tell the morning after.’ In almost no time, it became clear that many people wanted their clothes to tell those stories or, perhaps more accurately, clothes that would create stories worth telling. Within a year, Edie Campbell and Jourdan Dunn wore 16Arlington dresses on the red carpet, and Bergdorf Goodman, Lane Crawford, and Selfridges were stocking them. By February 2019, the brand had a slot in London Fashion Week.
From there, 16Arlington continued its meteoric rise: there were magazine covers, ecstatic reviews, and a growing list of celebrity admirers. In 2021, they launched a joyfully eccentric line of marabou-feather bridal wear. When Cavenati passed away from a sudden illness, Capaldo continued to move the brand forward as a tribute to her, debuting a succession of critically acclaimed collections and launching accessories and menswear.
When I visit Capaldo in 16Arlington’s West London studio, it’s four days before his London Fashion Week show, and the space is crackling with activity. The primarily female staff bustles around the space and types away at computers while a steady, upbeat thrum of music plays in the background. There are reams of glittery fabric stacked up along the walls to the ceiling next to someone working at a cutting table.
Capaldo greets me in his office. In person, he is warm and charismatic, the kind of person you would like to have at a party. There is a copy of the book This Young Monster by artist-writer Charlie Fox on his desk, its white Fitzcarraldo edition cover worn from frequent handling. “You must read it, '' Capaldo tells me with an earnest enthusiasm that he impressively sustains throughout our conversation.
Behind the desk, a mood board displays snapshots from the central inspiration for this season’s show: the exhibit "My Head is a Haunted House," curated by Fox and displayed at Sadie Coles Gallery in 2019. From the pictures, the exhibition looks like the White Cube meets Beetlejuice, with gallery-standard pristine walls and open-plan rooms made strange by zig-zag flooring and slime-green spotlights. On display are uncanny works of art: a sculpture of a swan in a bustle humping a dog in pantaloons; a video of a man in facial prosthetics smoking a cigarette; illuminated skulls on the wall; a fire-pit made out of a desk fan.
For this latest collection, Capaldo was looking to Fox’s work in "My Head is a Haunted House" and This Young Monster to work through his fascination with the accused and the monstrous. “In This Young Monster, Fox discusses the subject matter of the monster and what we deem monstrous and exposes the beauty of that,” Capaldo tells me. “I was asking myself, what attracts me to the monster? And the answer came in two forms [within the collection]. In physicality, it's the textures, the movement, and the size. Then, on a deeper level, it’s exploring the feelings, the vulnerability, what [monsters] represent and how society pins people as monstrous because they almost represent the unknown, something that people don't understand.”
“Then that led to so many offshoots,” he continues. “Looking at club kids, Twin Peaks, Buffy and Snow White, and this incredible melting pot of references that I applied to the collection in different ways. Ultimately, what stood out is that ‘monsters’ as society sees them are people who question the norm, challenge the status quo, and, in doing so, move us forward.”
Associating the sequined-covered beauties of 16Arlington with anything monstrous seems inconsistent. Still, it points to an underlying ethos that explains the brand’s melding of its signature party-going frivolity in recent years with a darker, more illusionary aesthetic.
For his first collection after Cavenati’s death, Capaldo covered dresses, miniskirts, and blazers in smudges of Swarovski crystals inspired by the marks his tears left on fabric as he worked. Those crystal tears were just one aspect of a dazzling collection that paid tribute to Cavenati’s legacy, alongside baby blue furs and shimmering dresses that moved along the body like waterfalls. They were also a fitting metaphor for what was to come in the brand's subsequent collections.
The following SS23 took inspiration from the forget-me-not flower, with lilac and white silk, furs, and snakeskins that contrasted with harsher all-black ensembles and boxy silhouettes. The next collection was titled ‘Wake,’ was about a funeral gathering and awakening to a new set of circumstances. Models wearing dark shades of chocolate brown and black, walking a runway covered in coffee grounds. After that, David Lynch’s postmodern noir Lost Highway inspired the last collection before Fall 2024. “I loved the idea of rendering the familiar with the unfamiliar last season,” Capaldo says.
Capaldo acknowledges that this aesthetic change is likely a response to grief. “Grief has funny ways of bringing itself out. Doing what I do is a blessing because it allows me to express emotion. But the way Charlie looks at the monstrous is almost how I look at grief, and I've found real beauty in it. Maybe there’s an underlying darkness subconsciously, but I want it to be an uplifting, empowering, and positive darkness.”
Despite more somber touches, the joyful spirit he and Cavenati established in the brand from the beginning is still embedded in 16Arlington’s DNA, and her influence can be felt in every facet of the latest collections.
“Kikka and I were together for ten years, five of which were professional and personal, and I learned so much in that time,” says Capaldo. “There were two very distinctive points of view: you had a woman looking at it from a female point of view and a man looking at it from a male point of view, and in that amalgamation of those two visions, you had this duality in our cultures [with Kikka being] Italian and [me being] British. There’s what Italy brings to the table in terms of art, design, and luxury, and what London brings to the table in terms of grit, conversation, and pushing against the norms.”
“Having worked with Kikka and having been with her, her voice is embedded in what I do now,” he continues. “We used to have endless fittings, and it was all about how she felt in things and making sure that the person wearing it felt the same thing in the end. There was no bigger compliment for us, then and now, than someone coming in and saying, ‘I had the best time wearing that.”
No matter what, 16Arlington remains a brand that makes stories happen. Capaldo tells me, “Somebody posted a picture of them wearing 16Arlington on Instagram the other day, and when I said it looks great, they replied, 'I posted this and got asked out on a date.’ I think that’s fab. I love that clothing can decorate us, not change us, but enhance what’s there. I think that's always been at the outset of what we do, and I hope it’s still present.”
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