‘Fashion or art? It doesn’t have to be one or the other’: 16Arlington’s Marco Capaldo on turning curator for new London show

One of the first things you see when you visit Memories of the Future, the new exhibition at Frieze No.9 Cork Street curated by 16Arlington’s creative director Marco Capaldo (presented by Almine Rech), are two polaroids of orchids shot by Andy Warhol in 1980. The extravagance of the flowers’ fleshy petals and the elegant cut of their fluid forms against their white background emphasise the strange, primordial beauty of a plant that dates back to the twilight of the dinosaurs. At the same, the harsh light, the glimpse of the humble plastic pot in the corner frame, the mixture of glamour and messiness that is classic Warhol, makes the images epochally modern. In front of them you feel, all at once, that you are looking at something very old and very new.

For Capaldo, this interplay of the past and the future unites each of the fourteen pieces he selected for his first exhibition. ‘I've always been really intrigued by the way our memories are altered by change as we move forward into our futures,’ Capaldo tells me. ‘I think so many tools exist in this modern world to capture memories in their accuracy and I really wanted to investigate that. But in addition, I also really wanted to investigate the subjectivity behind memories.’

Marco Capaldo and Almine Rech’s Memories of the Future at Frieze Cork Street

A Warhol polaroid was one of the first artworks that came to mind when Capaldo hit on the concept for the show, in large part because they are his first memory of being moved by a work of art. It is an experience that has informed Capaldo’s work as a fashion designer ever since, including his most recent S/S 2025 catwalk show, which was staged at the historic Royal Academy of Arts during London Fashion Week and featured a series of sculptures by the artist Jesse Pollock.

While the art of other people is a recurring source of inspiration for Capaldo, so too are his own memories. In 2021, Capaldo’s 16Arlington's co-founder and partner Federica ‘Kikka’ Cavenati passed away, and Capaldo has continued to move the brand forward in her memory in the years since. Every collection has, in its own particular way, nodded to Cavenati’s enduring influence on the brand and Capaldo’s own process of coming to terms with a future without her. As a designer, Capaldo is constantly exploring the relationship between what we remember and what we hope for, and as a curator he is doing the same.

When Capaldo first began working on the show, Almine Rech connected him with a collector in Los Angeles who has the largest collection of the Warhols in the world. Ten minutes before the call, Capaldo picked up a biography of Warhol he had on his office shelf. ‘It was a book that Kikka and I had bought when we went to an opening for it at the Tate,’ Capaldo tells me. ‘Which was a lovely memory in itself, but when I pulled this book out, I felt something inside and when I opened it I found a flower from Kikka’s funeral bouquet and I pressed it in that specific book years before. That triggered so many memories ten minutes before that phone call, and when I told the collector about it, he told me that Andy did a series of Polaroids on orchids,’ he continues. ‘That’s just one example of one of the pieces, but it is emblematic of how it [the entire exhibition] just fell into place.’

Along with Warhol, other iconic names in the show include John Giorno’s Dial-A-Poem ‘free poetry service’ from 1970, which invites visitors to pick up a rotary phone and listen to icons like William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg read them a poem. In Capaldo’s words, ‘it is a real connection with the past. So many of these people have lived incredible lives and have passed, and their memory lives on through their voice, which is so beautiful.’ The same is true of Francesca Woodman, who has a photograph in the show and whose work, made before her death at 22 years old, has an eerie, spectral aesthetic that is still impactful today.

Yet, the most exciting aspect of Memories of the Future is that it gathers into one space so many exciting, young talents working today These include paintings by George Rouy, Rhea Dillon and Remi Ajani, as well as a sculpture by Jesse Pollock from the S/S 2025 catwalk show. There’s also an installation by Sandra Poulson in the middle of the exhibition which, in Capaldo’s words, ‘is such a poignant nod to the theme of the show, since some of the most beautiful memories and some of the most difficult memories happen around a dining table’. Alongside many other works by some of the most notable emerging names working in the UK now.

It is an impressive exhibition that showcases Capaldo’s skills as a curator, as well as the skills of the artists on display within it. For Capaldo, though, the act of curating, of taking an idea and translating it into a visual medium, is not all that different from his day job. ‘People keep asking me, fashion or art?’ he says. ‘But it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Both are an attraction and an admiration for useful things, for talented people and for inquisitive minds. Art and fashion, it all exists in the same universe.’

‘Memories of the Future’ runs until 16 October 2024 at Frieze No.9 Cork Street, London, W1S 3LL

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