EVA POPA
SCHOOL
INSTAGRAM-Amsterdam Fashion Institute
INSTAGRAM PROFILE
ABOUT EVA :
Eva Popa is a knitwear designer from Bucharest, Romania, whose work bridges the quiet beauty of heritage craft with the urgent needs of contemporary fashion. Her passion for textiles began at the age of seven, when her grandmother taught her to knit. That formative experience sparked a lifelong fascination with making—where patience, time, and care transform yarn into meaning.
Eva’s creative path started at a fine arts high school, where she studied painting, sculpture, and printmaking techniques such as linocut and aquatint. These early explorations enriched her visual language, but knitwear remained her true focus. At the Amsterdam Fashion Institute, she specialized in knitwear and textile design, immersing herself in both traditional handcraft and experimental processes. Courses such as Knitology and a minor in Textile Making allowed her to refine a personal approach that merges artisanal sensitivity with technical innovation. An internship with the Shima Seiki WholeGarment machine further expanded her expertise, connecting her love for handcraft with sustainable industrial applications.
Her graduate collection, Resilient Forms, embodies this balance of tradition and innovation. Inspired by the robust coats of Romanian shepherds in the Carpathian Mountains—garments made from natural materials to endure harsh weather—she reinterprets their functionality for today. Wool becomes the foundation for exploration: felting is pushed to act as waterproofing, crochet transforms into reinforcement, and knitting generates sustainable alternatives to fur. The result is an outerwear line that proposes a slower, more intentional vision of contemporary silhouettes: protective garments that can serve equally as a puffer-jacket substitute in the city or as functional layers in the mountains.
For Eva, design is more than creating garments—it is storytelling through craftsmanship. Every piece is conceived as a dialogue between past and future, process and purpose, functionality and beauty. By drawing on Romanian heritage while embracing modern techniques, she seeks to show how craft can be reintroduced as a vital tool for today’s challenges: ecological responsibility, durability, and emotional longevity.
Through her work, Eva Popa proposes an alternative to fast fashion—garments that carry history, identity, and care. In Resilient Forms, tradition becomes a lens for imagining sustainable futures, where beauty is inseparable from function.
