24 Apr 2020
Carmen Emanuela Popa is an emerging designer, known for his avant-garde, conceptualist works, based on philosophical theories, with a strong emotional impact, true visual metaphors dedicated to human being.
She was born on April 3, 1976, in Adjud, Romania. Her first collection was made when Carmen was six years old (!). Inspired by dramatic works of Picasso and Monet, adolescent designer clearly determined her mission. She should create the clothes that will reflect her thoughts, view and feelings.

With impressive international reviews, designer Carmen Emanuela Popa brings to the forefront the human being, idealizing in sophisticated costumes and approaching stylistic contrast dualities, placing the vulnerable emotional condition of the ordinary man in the context of a flamboyant opulence of today's society.

The Romanian designer militates for Peace in Paris, on 25 September 2015, of International Day of Peace, with pieces from the Contemporary Unknown Soldier collection, for which she receives the Best Catwalk Award at the Athens Xclusive Designers Week, Greece. In 2014 presents WOMAN N collection, in Moscow, at Mercedes Benz Fashion Week, Russia, a woman's vision, which was suggestively named by the international press, “a refugee of the future“.
She was compared to British designer Alexander McQueen by the French press in a video - review of the Woman N collection at Mercedes Benz Fashion Week, Russia, a collection that has been remarkably well placed in the top of presentations in history of this event, by the American publication Huffington Post.
With the 56 Route Collection Carmen Emanuela Popa is a Visual Arts Partner of the International Project UNESCO's Academy of Young Women, The Fight Against Xenophobia, Extremism and Aggression, a project initiated by the National Commission of Romania for UNESCO, which took place in August 2017. With a strong manifest speech, the project supports the young woman who is still the victim of discrimination and violence.

From March 2018, she started collaborating, with a program of a traineeship with the prestigious IUAV University, Venice, Italy.
Carmen Emanuela Popa is a graduate of the Faculty of Decorative Arts and Design, at the National University of Arts, Bucharest, with a Master in Fashion Design / Strategies of Fashion and Costume / UNAB. At present, she is working on her PhD thesis at the same university in the field of Visual Arts, Fashion Department, with a theme that addresses the migration of the symbolism of the fashion outfit to the contemporary art object.
Her unconventional concepts have appeared in publications such as British VOGUE, Tatler UK, Huffington Post, ParismodesTV, ITAR-TASS Agency, Harpers BAZAAR, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, ONE Magazine, RFI, China Daily, and other specialized publications in Russia, Ukraine, Greece, China, France and Romania.

Fashion is equally a science, but also a gigantic beletristic work in which chemical, physical phenomen meet, a whole suite of poems, satin waves and glitters like the water of a sea in the morning light. A coat can make you happy because it is confusing with your own being at sight. Fashion is not only a theory full of techniques and mathematics, it is a practice of how a piece of clothing sets in a imperial maner on a man, transforming it for a few moments into a Prince of his inner kingdom.
Fashion can create clothes but can also create parallel universes visually. It can offer eccentric and plausible, overwhelming and utopian variants, loaded with meanings and unique for tomorrow's man.   
All the collections created so far have sought to bring into light an honest discourse of the human being, talked about its drama, but also about the beauty that surrounds it every day, and which touches its spiritual worlds. It's the emotion that makes us alive. A coat must come in completing this state and create joy.
The joy of seeing it and then of wearing it.  I love the materials their structure, their plenitude of finesse and the colors in thousands of tones. I like playing with lines and volumes, experimenting with things that are revealing at that time, the birth of surprising and unexpected combinations, the revelation of the metaphor.  Also, the stylistic context is extremely generous in terms of creative play. He brings you to the fields of harmony and ultimately to the aspiration of perfection.   All these things are wonderful and make us more human and closer to our inner heavens. Closer to contemplation and closer to each other.
Carmen Emanuela Popa

Her unique work with innovative character goes beyond the limits of stereotypes, borders and invites the public to a complex and intransigent dialogue on the social issues that are now intensifying in the contemporary world. She launches through her work to manifest a message of tolerance and love under all forms of expression of the disfavoring or happier actors of humanity.


TESTIMONIALS

 It is not just about attires. It is an art that makes you catch a moment, feel and embrace the beauty.
MERCEDES BENZ FASHION WEEK RUSSIA

To make the avant-garde in Russia is very difficult, but you did it!
ALEXANDER SHUMSKY – President, MBFW, Russia

Carmen is an anti-system artist, because she brings the average man into haute couture, and this makes her work original.
MIHAELA VARGA – Art Critic, Romania

Although your works are conceptual, but you managed to do very wearable.
MIHAELA DEDEOGLU  –  Journalist RFI ROMANIA

The military ballet theme was a very new, fresh and interesting idea to present as a new designer. This new idea was based on the classic khaki for the army look, but unexpected volumes created this different from the common result, which is why the "best catwalk" award was easy to get.
POSHFASHION ATHENS

Carmen Emanuela Popa's collection combines several worlds across strong, very couture silhouettes into rigid materials, reminiscent of Alexander McQueen's imaginings.
PARISMODES TV – Review MBFW Russia, Moscow

When you heard many horns, I stopped my car in front of your store, I admired showcase.
Mrs. E. LEROI – CUSTOMER

I wish for every customer who leaves from you with a piece of clothing, to feel what I feel now ...
Mrs. L. MANESCU – CUSTOMER

How are you, my favorite designer ..
CLARENCE VAN DER PUTTE – Former Lecturer  Business Management at AMFI – AMSTERDAM FASHION INSTITUTE

You are a visionary! Your work is very clear and definite, it is very feminine and you have a very developed sense of proportion. The materials shine, the costumes are very strong but very sensitive at the same time. You use silk, you make conceptual wearable clothing, if we look at Converse we see changes in time, but there is only one thing that makes them original. That I want from you. I look at the sample you are proposing, with silk and lines attached, in the quilting technique. The silk has been exploited in various types throughout the history of fashion, with prints, relief structures, etc., but this is different!
Prof. MARIA BONIFACIC –  IUAV UNIVERSITY, Venice, Italy

Girl you're so high, don't forget this ...
Prof. Univ. Dr. UNDA POPP – NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF ARTS, Bucharest

Your Project Presentatioan was extraordinary!
Prof. GABRIELE MONTI –  IUAV UNIVERSITY, Venice, Italy

Carmen has very innovative and elaborate ideas. She is very good, intelligent and with a high demand for her wonderful and very particular work.
MARIA MARIN, CATIA GIACON  –  Heads of Technical Department,  IUAV UNIVERSITY, Venice, Italy

As full professor and director of the BA Program in fashion design at IUAV University of Venice, I like to introduce Carmen Emanuela Popa. While at IUAV, Carmen works with a commitment to develop her doctoral project with dedication and fun and it was a pleasure to work with her!
Prof. MARIA LUISA FRISA –  IUAV UNIVERSITY, Venice, Italy

The modernization of folklore is the hardest attempt of modernity.
It's the best intervention so far!
Anthropologist, Prof. Univ. Dr. DRAGOS GHEORGHIU – NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF ARTS, Bucharest

To take this amount of cultural history on board is no small task for Romanian designer Carmen Emanuela Popa. We need a wind of change in the self seeking fashion world and that must come exactly from such sources as folklore and places other than the Pan Western European fashion world.
SANDA MILLER  –  Journalist and Fashion Critic, London

Thus her new collection is not so much to do with the aesthetics of wabi sabi (imperfection) celebrated by Yamamoto and the Japanese designers, but it is about loneliness, dislocation and a peculiar savage beauty, as only Alexander McQueen understood.
SANDA MILLER  –  Journalist and Fashion Critic, London

If Yves Saint Laurent lived, he would have taken you by the arm and brought you to his atelier immediately.
Arh. A. BERGAL  –  Paris Exhibition 2019

You should propose a capsule collection at Adidas, etc., many young designers have collaborated in this way and not all of them had what you have […]
SOPHIE NEGROPONTES – Fondator, The Negropontes Gallery, Paris

A big thank you for this great exhibition you have offered us! ... I was seduced by your creativity, your talent and your intellectual approach!
CARLA ARIGONI  –   President of  “Comité Municipal d'Animation Culturelle du 1er, Mairie 1“, Paris