I completely agree with you and found your post so interesting. I'm mid-career change, currently studying for a degree in Bespoke Tailoring (partly b/c I'm too old for a traditional apprenticeship - they do still have them on Savile Row, but only for the youngsters), and at the moment I'm on an extended (paid, luckily) internship for a very high profile opera company where I have learned, very very quickly, just how little I know! I think that's one of the things that draws me to costuming/tailoring anyway - the fact that you never, never stop learning - but I'm lucky enough to be working at the moment with a head cutter who's come out of retirement for a year or two partly as a favour to the company, and partly because she wants to share her knowledge, which is just fantastic. When it comes to historical tailoring, it's the cutting knowledge that is so hard to come by - over here (I'm in the UK) good men's cutters are unbelievably rare and companies are having real trouble finding them, so even though menswear isn't ultimately where I want to be, the teaching is fantastic to have (and also very interesting).
I think many of the most useful things I've learned have been little tips or techniques that people have just told me in the course of a day when I've been working on something relevant - you just can't get that kind of information in books or in a structured teaching environment.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2008-05-01 09:26 pm (UTC)I think many of the most useful things I've learned have been little tips or techniques that people have just told me in the course of a day when I've been working on something relevant - you just can't get that kind of information in books or in a structured teaching environment.