Emilio Cavallini (San Miniato, Province of Pisa) is an Italian fashion designer, artist.
Emilio Cavallini (San Miniato, 1945) is a renowned artist and designer whose forty-year contribution to the fashion world includes singular creations for the houses of Mary Quant, Dior, Celine, Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen and Gucci. Emilio Cavallini's designer career lead him to navigate artistic circles, especially in the United States. While he gained notoriety as a designer in the fashion world, he started to create important artworks to fulfill his own personal interests. Emilio Cavallini's artistic path follows important art movements of the second half of the 1900's from the Kinetic Art to the Generative Art. A few years ago, in 2010, he decided to devote himself exclusively to his art and to make it public. Emilio Cavallini uses unconventional materials for his art, materials borrowed from the fashion world: nylon yarns, printed fabrics, his own tights, yarn's reels etc. His artistic research is founded on geometry and mathematics: dots, lines, squares, triangles, circles are settled in a 3D environment. Everything follows combinatorial principles, permutations, growth algorithms and the most recent mathematical-geometrical theories, as you can see from his artworks titles.
His eponymous label is exported worldwide, from New York to London, Paris, Milan, Tokyo and beyond. In 1989 he was awarded Venice’s Leone d’Oro for creativity and innovation. His artistic and industrial contributions were recognized in the last decade by Italy’s Prime Minister and President with several national honors including “Knight of Industry”, “Officer of the Republic” and “Commendatore”. An artist’s book published by Skira was released in 2010 to celebrate three decades of his art practice. Cavallini’s work was presented in a solo exhibition at the 2011 Triennale of Milan, during which he constructed a site specific, four-meter cube of stocking thread. His work has been the subject of critical texts by Sergio Risaliti, Laura Cherubini, Silvia Pegoraro, among others. Rosai Ugoloni Modern- New York (2015), Opera Gallery, Paris-France(2015), and Galleria Valmore, Vicenza-Italy (2015) presented his most recent solo exhibitions.