“PTSD: Reframed” is a sculptural fashion collection and musical production that addresses the emotional and psychological effects of sexual abuse and coercion on the mind and body through dress form. Each look represents distinct psychological responses to trauma, including symptoms of post-traumatic stress and complex survival mechanisms that can echo over time, particularly when experiences remain repressed or misinterpreted.
The collection confronts the pervasive denial and entrenched, stigmatizing narratives that have long shaped how experiences of sexual abuse and coercion are understood and responded to across cultures and institutions. These forces structure the frameworks through which trauma is interpreted, often leaving survivors to make sense of their experiences through distorted lenses that produce self-blame, shame, and self-surveillance. In the absence of open dialogue, critical discourse, and collective support for processing and reprocessing these experiences, such narratives remain unchallenged and are more readily internalized.
The collection explores how such conditions can sculpt and fashion a survivor’s sense of self, as these frameworks feed the internal stories individuals come to repeat, reinforcing patterns that structure perception, identity, and lived reality. It further suggests that this recursive process may deepen traumatic imprinting, contributing to the persistence of post-traumatic stress responses and, in some cases, patterns of repetition or reenactment.
By exposing the cyclical relationship between cultural narratives and internalized experience, the collection points to the broader consequences of denial and silence. Unexamined and unprocessed trauma does not remain isolated but continues to replicate across time, contributing to the persistence of intergenerational patterns that are reinforced across both cultural and interpersonal contexts. The collection ultimately calls for critical examination, the disruption of harmful narratives, and the creation of space for experiences to be recognized, articulated, and transformed.
