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When the contents of the Tirocchi dress
shop at 514 Broadway were offered to the RISD
Museum by Dr. Louis Cella, Jr., the first task for
the curators was to make a complete inventory of
everything they found. There were thousands of
items in the shop rooms, including business
records as well as garments, textile pieces,
notions and trims, and accessories such as
handbags and belts. It took the curators a year
just to inventory the contents of the shop.
The paper materials included business
correspondence, client letters, employee pay
books, client books and bills, suppliers' bills
and receipts, programs from couture showings,
promotional materials from vendors, photographs,
household bills, and personal correspondence. Some
of these documents, in particular the client transaction
ledgers, and personal and client correspondence and measurements, have been
transcribed and made available here for online research. In
addition, lists have been compiled of all the people who worked for the
Tirocchis or patronized their shop, with background information from
city and census records. This information helps to round out the
picture of the clients' lives and interrelationships. The
most extensive cataloguing task, however, was the complete
description of the objects. This included specifying
where each object was found, assigning identifiers for its storage
and location in the museum's collection, and describing the object's
dimensions, colors, materials, and any tags or labels associated
with it. In some cases, a photograph of the object was included in
the inventory record.
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