The Craft of Code, The Code of Craft: Digitalization and Sensory-Emotional Knowledge

Digitalization in luxury fashion enhances precision and efficiency through 3D CAD, digital twins, and AI-driven design. Yet, these tools struggle to encode sensory-emotional knowledge - the embodied expertise that defines craftsmanship. Through a seven-year longitudinal case study of ALPHA, a luxury manufacturer, we reveal how digitalization disrupts material intelligence through Perceptual Flattening, which abstracts multisensory engagement into visual approximations; Epistemic Discontinuity, which fragments tacit knowledge transmission; and Symbolic Devaluation, which diminishes trust in digital artifacts. Rather than replacing craftsmanship, digitalization paradoxically reinforces its necessity, as firms develop hybrid validation mechanisms to bridge computational precision and material expertise. Our findings challenge the assumption of seamless digital convergence, offering new insights into digital affordances, knowledge recombination, and the epistemic boundaries of digital materiality.