Yasha Morehouse

Thesis

The minimum viable community - workshop structure and tacit knowledge transfer in bespoke tailoring

Supervisor: Bethan Bide

Research interests

When Lave and Wenger developed the community of practice framework, they used tailors as a primary example. Thirty years later, tailoring training has become the clearest demonstration of what a community of practice is not. Data from the CGIA di Mestre shows that sarti are among the traditional craft categories suffering the steepest decline in Italy, driven by the extended duration of training, the cost of apprenticeship relative to low salary projections, and a broader cultural devalorization of manual trades (CGIA di Mestre, 2024). Less examined is a more fundamental problem: whether contemporary training modalities are structurally capable of transmitting the tacit knowledge that constitutes bespoke craft at all.