The School of Fashion at Academy of Art University in San Francisco premiered, since 2005, the collections of recent graduates during Mercedes-Benz New York Fashion Week. This season there was also Marina Nikolaeva Popska among the seven women’s wear designers who presented their collections.

Born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria, Popska studied Textile Design at the local School of Applied Arts, focusing on design composition, pattern making, silk painting and screen-printing. Awarded a BA in Textiles from Sofia’s National Academy of Arts where she developed her skills in textile interior design, installations and conceptual and performance art, Popska also got a Master degree from the same institution and took part in numerous seminars and workshops, exhibiting her paintings, drawings and textiles across Europe and the United States. Continuing her professional practice at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, Popska strengthened her knowledge in fashion design and double majored in fashion and knitwear design this year.

Her collection - inspired by nature, humanity and light - featured multi-coloured extra-light jacquard cardigans and fluid feminine dresses with ethereal wing-like ruffles. Popska’s knits with their chaotic mix and manipulation of rich textures and multiple colours – from peacock-green and blue to orange, coral-red, rose-pink and nude – created an extraordinarily varied chromatic jungle, offering the wearer a new aesthetical experience.

Dazed Digital: Can you tell us more about your creative process and about the inspirations that led you to the collection presented during New York Fashion Week?
Marina Nikolaeva Popska: I find inspiration in everything that surrounds me, from nature to humanity and arts. I’m usually attracted by wide colour palettes and by a variety of textures and materials. My silhouettes and constructions are either dramatically exaggerated or harmonised and I tend to manipulate or create the fabrics for my own collections. In my current collection, I tried to combine three main themes, nature, humanity and light. The concept began around 2005 and it involved a philosophical metamorphosis, from human being to tree. This process implies that the body is left behind and the spirit representing the hidden light inside us is released. The eight-piece collection was therefore based on the visual representation of this transformation from human to tree and on the de-materialisation of the human into spirit and light. The latter is dynamically symbolised through the intensity of the colour combinations and pattern formulations. I conceived this collection like one single organism rather than like a series of individual pieces, every item is an exceptional piece on its own, but it belongs to a group of others, inspired by the same concept.

DD: How did you feel about all the positive feedback you got about your collection?
Marina Nikolaeva Popska: I was surprised in a very nice way, as I did not really expect it. I have always tried to bring positive energy to people with every art piece I have so far created in my career. Seeing my optimism being appreciated makes me feel satisfied since it means that the message carried in my designs is understood and shared by other people.

DD: What fascinates you about knitwear?
Marina Nikolaeva Popska: I developed a strong attraction to every aspect of art and design also thanks to my mother, a professor in textile and fashion design. I spent my entire life surrounded by hundreds of pictures and paintings, books, textiles and fabrics. In addition to that, my education mainly focused on textile design. I developed an interest in knitwear during an exchange programme in Finland in 2003 and did further studies about it at the Academy of Art. Creating my own fabrics, developing repeated patterns and working with multiple textures and yarns was something I have always done, but I was fascinated by the idea of creating by myself an entire collection, starting from the yarns.  

DD: How do you usually choose the yarns to work with?
Marina Nikolaeva Popska: The yarn quality in terms of strength, weight, thickness and stretch capabilities is very important. These interesting qualities are highlighted in the double, triple or multiple colour jacquards. This process allows to create the textile by interlocking the yarn in a series of connected loops of various sizes and thickness. After the steaming procedure some of the fibres shrink and others preserve their original width and this quality helps establishing a strong textural surface. For this collection, the choice of yarns was also dictated by the will to create extra-fine pieces and give at the same time the illusion of the softness of the human skin.

DD: Has knitwear helped you developing a precise aesthetic for your collection?
Marina Nikolaeva Popska: Knitwear is a fantastic way to explore your creativity. In a way knitwear is very similar to doing a scientific research. Finding the best combination of colours and the right composition to arrange those nuances is quite challenging, yet once the artwork is finished you feel very satisfied. Knitwear allowed me to build a whole new world of combinations, textures and shades and a new concept and visual representation, it also helped me exploring an aesthetic I built up in my artistic background.

DD: Are you planning to develop your knitwear further and start your own label or would you like to acquire a little bit more experience working for some established fashion houses?
Marina Nikolaeva Popska: The future looks bright when it comes to knitwear and I strongly believe I will bring noticeable change in this exciting textile medium. My collection features designs that are very unusual from the ordinary knitted garments and I will definitely try to develop my ideas further in my future experiments. Being a fashion and knitwear designer, I would love to start my own fashion house as this would allow me to focus on personal project developments for a series of high fashion collections. Yet I would also like to work for top houses such as Dior, Missoni or Givenchy and I’m definitely going to apply as an assistant designer for one of these companies. It would be amazing if I could work directly with their creative directors and gain in this way more experience developing further my skills.

Photography by Randy Brooke