Romanian designer Carmen Emanuela Popa is present at London Fashion Week, in the Profile Designer section, with her new collection “Re: Childhood”.
Taking place from 17–21 September, London Fashion Week brings together established names in British fashion alongside a new generation of designers and emerging voices within the international creative industry.
As part of this edition, Carmen Emanuela Popa presents her new collection “Re: Childhood” in the Profile Designer section, a conceptual project exploring the relationship between the original experiences of childhood, affective memory, and adult reality.
Re: Childhood
Sequentially, our experiences intensify with the passage of time. Fragments that, perhaps, once composed our entire world, return in hyperbolized variants, invading our psyche and emotional field, so intensely and brutally until they capture our present reality.
Once we were indestructibly united with a realm where nothing was clandestine, our being interacted using all its senses with the allegorical painting of which it was a part. It was there was no imagination of the future and no importance of the past. Because the first was too far away to prefigure it with a cerebral capacity – of an infant –, and the second was much too tumultuous in discoveries to be analyzed. But emotion – the only lucid consciousness – multiplied exponentially.
The body was biologically metamorphosing and the mind and soul were completely absorbing the game of existence. Metaphors were gigantically composed of endless fields and the presence of a man at the existential beginning made everything seem overwhelming, but doubled by a peace of acceptance and, often, contemplation (see Plato). What is life? It is the sum of emotional intensities. In adulthood, you recognize the paintings of your museum and know which story is the most beautiful of all, or the deepest. In this amalgam of experiences, a priority is delineated, that of protecting innocence. The drama in which beauty slips into avoidance and nature, with all its beings at its disposal, can be deprived of integrity. There is a sovereignty of nature, and this must be understood through the very non-negotiable authority of flora and fauna. And animals should no longer, in an empathetic ecology, be sacrificed.
Dialogue between species requires mutual respect for life. The present man is distinguished by the abuse of power. The everyday food consists of colored feathers and multicolored scales. The hierarchy of species is still unfair. The recourse to childhood reveals all this regressive evolution. The notion of external Beauty to man is something that does not belong to him, not even to himself. The drivers of the bodies are, in many cases, unconscious of the vehicle they are driving.
This bio-robot experiences existence in various ways, but, from time to time, something unclear seizes his senses. The light that encompasses his entire being is probably the same for all human beings, no one misses love. And this must be expressed, as everyone knows in an absolute way and this is worth it all the time.