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A unique take on how fashion might function as a tool for representing the lived experience of endometriosis has earned two Gqeberha researchers international acclaim.
Mieke Janse van Rensburg and Micaela Scholtz, from Nelson Mandela University’s department of visual arts, recently presented their collaborative research at the 12th World Women’s Studies Conference in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Their research presented at the conference, under the theme “The Power of Dialogue: Abolishing the Conditions of Voicelessness”, earned them the prestigious Superlative Presenter Award.
Their paper, “Unveiling the Unseen: Intersection of Fashion Design and Artmaking to Enhance an Autoethnographic Narrative Through Dialogue and Trauma-Informed Design”, investigates how fashion might function as a tool for representing the lived experience of endometriosis.
While fashion is often viewed primarily as clothing, the researchers argue that it can also serve as a powerful form of communication and self-expression.
“Fashion holds a compelling duality — it’s deeply personal, yet inherently social,” Janse van Rensburg said.
“It operates as a visual language that people instinctively decode, making it a powerful vehicle for identity, representation.”
Janse van Rensburg, a fashion designer, approached Scholtz, a designer-artist who was diagnosed with endometriosis in 2012.
The result is an interdisciplinary study combining fashion design, artmaking and autoethnography — a research method that draws on personal lived experience.
Scholtz said unlike many studies that examined endometriosis through a clinical lens, this project centred the voice of someone living with the condition.
“Research indicates that women with endometriosis frequently face significant delays in diagnosis, often feeling dismissed, disbelieved and having their symptoms normalised.
" It impacts the physical body, has an emotional toll, and affects the complex evolution of self-perception,” she said.
The researchers describe endometriosis as an example of what they term “invisible trauma” as the condition may not leave visible external marks, but it can profoundly affect identity, relationships, daily functioning and psychological wellbeing.
Their research asks a simple but important question — how might fashion be used to unveil invisible trauma?
Scholtz’s lived experiences informed the development of a conceptual fashion collection that translates physical symptoms, emotional experiences and evolving self-perception into garment designs and textile surfaces.
Original artworks created by Scholtz, including visual representations of endometriotic lesions, informed the collection’s colour palette, textile prints and aesthetic language.
The collection remains a work in progress, with the duo hoping to move beyond conceptual sketches toward the production of physical garments and a future exhibition.
“This research offers an alternative perspective, one that acknowledges the condition as part of the self, without allowing it to become the whole of it,” Scholtz said.
Janse van Rensburg said the project also challenged assumptions about fashion’s role in society.
“When you stop seeing clothing as purely material and start seeing it as an act of agency, something shifts.
“That’s where fashion becomes genuinely powerful,” she said.
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