CARMEN EMANUELA POPA

Carmen Emanuela Popa is a Romanian fashion designer known for her strong conceptual design, she founded the brand with the same name embarking on a journey through the fashion world from vast philosophical influences, creating unique and visually challenging images, transmitting emotion and humanistic messages. 

The characters she proposes are contemporary soldiers, kings metamorphosed into pure rural characters, urban entities that carry in their emotional baggage ancestral origins but who wear outfits made of high-tech materials, mixes of ecological and neoprene, natural and waterproof, all in a dynamic sportswear allure.

Her latest works are on London Fashion Week official Platform in September 2025 / HUMANS Collection is on display at the Profile Designer section. From the September 2020 Season she has been a designer with a constant participation at LFW.

With impressive international reviews, POPA receives the Best Catwalk Award at the Athens Xclusive Designers Week in Greece, with Contemporary Unknown Soldier Collection. The designer presents Woman N at Mercedes Benz Fashion Week, a woman's vision which was suggestively named by the international press   a refugee of the future.

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.

In 2019 she exhibits at the City Hall 1, in Paris, Place du Louvre 4, the works of the Future Folk. Costume Royal project. A concept inspired by the line of French royal dresses brought in urban area by materials and sportswear element and with an particular accessory that referred to environmental and emotional pollution, the mask, which today has become a contemporary care symbol of the whole world.

Carmen Emanuela Popa is a PhD graduate in Fashion Design / Faculty of Decorative Arts and Design / Fashion Department at the National University of Arts, Bucharest, with a BA in Arts and Textile Design / Printing and MA in Fashion Design / Fashion and Costume Strategies / UNAB. The thesis theme is about migration of the symbolism of the fashion outfit to the contemporary art object. From March 2018, she started a program of a traineeship ( 6 months ) with the prestigious IUAV University / Fashion Design, Venice, Italy.
Her final Project is called SHOW Me Your Heart.

Beyond the visual and conceptual layers, her work is profoundly infused with poetry. The poetic dimension functions both as a methodology and as a form of resistance, opening symbolic spaces where fragility and intensity coexist. POPA's practice investigates identity, corporeality, through an expressionist and interdisciplinary visual language. 

Her unconventional concepts have appeared in publications and media such as British VOGUE, TATLER UK, Huffington Post, ParisModesTV, Harper's BAZAAR, Marie Claire, TVR, RRC, Cosmopolitan, RFI, China Daily, BBC News / In Pictures, NEO2 Magazine, Fibre 2 Fashion, Getty Images, The Vanilla Issue, Romanian Cultural Institute in London and in other specialized press in France, UK, Greece, Spain, Chine and Romania.

She currently lives and works in Paris and continues to explore the tensions between femininity, hybridity and the post-identity narrative.
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Her artistic vision is not so much to do with the wabi-sabi (imperfection) aesthetic celebrated by Yamamoto and the Japanese Designers, but rather about loneliness, dislocation and a special wild beauty. 

SANDA MILLER – Journalist and Fashion Critic, London

ANTONIO ALFARO – Fashion Editor NEO2 Magazine, Spain