Marco Capaldo

The founder and creative director of 16Arlington talks about how love laid the ground for the cult brand 

- Cherry Mui

You can tell a brand is doing exceptionally well when celebrities from Amal Clooney to Lady Gaga sport its sequinned dresses on red carpets; closer to home, fashionistas have been spotted wearing its creations at parties across Asia. In just five short years, 16Arlington has become the go-to brand for occasion dressing.

Partners both in life and work, Marco Capaldo, a London-born and bred Italian, and Federica “Kikka” Cavenati, an Italian student, founded the brand after they graduated from the London outpost of fashion college Istituto Marangoni in 2017. “It was a real passion project between the pair of us; it was a combination of our personal and design aesthetics,” Capaldo tells Tatler over video call. “What came with that was a brand that really empowered women, and was all about feeling. It was something that we were creating to make the wearer feel like the best version of herself.” The label name came from the address of the flat they shared at the time, where friends would come to hang out but also try on the duo’s co-designed pieces.

Capaldo and Cavenati shared a rare compatibility in which their visions and aesthetics found a middle ground: a great marriage of raw elegance, unapologetic glamour and powerful silhouettes. People would recognise the brand from recurring elements including elaborate feathers, liquid sequins and risqué cut-outs. “Those textures have become rooted in a way as part of the DNA of the brand,” says Capaldo. “But we really push every season to reinvent, reimagine and kind of restrict how we execute those pieces, whether for one season we’re changing it from an ostrich to a marabou or layering it under netting, there’s a constant evolvement.”