The Tirocchi records become less and less informative about style during the mid-1930s. The bookkeeper stopped recording designers and couturiers, except on rare occasions, more often naming only the importer. Rodier wool dresses and suits increased in popularity throughout the late 1930s. Liberty "loan" (lawn, a light-weight cotton fabric) dresses become popular for summer wear. By 1933, the effects of the Depression began to be seen, as clients delayed payment and canceled orders. The client base shrank over these lean years from the heyday of the 1920s until finally, by 1941, only the faithful few were left. Mrs. Frederick Stanhope Peck, Mrs. Harold J. Gross, and Mrs. Byron S. Watson remained from the early days. One of the last entries in the customer ledger is Mrs. Watson's visit in May 1939, when the bookkeeper suddenly abandoned her policy of not recording designers' names. Chic as always, Mrs. Watson purchased a print dinner dress by Mainbocher, a Chanel suit, a fitted dinner dress in wine-colored silk by Molyneux, and a Jay-Thorpe hat. In 1944, only Mrs. Peck was being dressed by Anna, who by then was ill and probably unable to handle a larger clientele.

Even if the records in the Tirocchi Archive do not reveal in visible detail every dress that passed through the shop or every sport suit purchased by its clients, they explicitly document the changing silhouettes and styles of decoration between 1915 and 1941. The dresses, coats, bathing suits, and evening wraps found in the shop, if arranged chronologically, chart for the observer not only the different silhouettes of fashion, but also the overall aesthetic of modernism as it developed through the years. From the chemise and cloche in a cubist mode of the 1920s to the evening dresses of the late 1930s with their body-skimming silhouettes and "machine-age" reflective surfaces, each garment has a particular relationship to the art of its time.

Raymond Loewy, the industrial designer of everything from the Pennsylvania Railroad's streamlined Broadway Limited train to the Studebaker Champion Cruising Sedan, made this point unforgettably in his "Evolution Chart of Design."(44) He compares the changes in architecture, from the ornate houses of earlier centuries to streamlined modern architecture up to the 1930s, with developments in female dress, starting with the seventeenth century's long, full, enormous skirts, full sleeves, and high coiffures and ending in 1934 with the svelte, form-fitting evening gown, exactly reflecting the silhouette of gowns found in the Tirocchi shop [fig. 146]. In the same chart, using a woman clad in a bathing suit, he shows how the very ideal of a woman's figure changed from the plump form of the 1890s to the thin, long-legged creature of 1935.

Fashion designers conceived each of their garments in the context of the greater art world, and were themselves recognized as decorative artists familiar with the concerns of their time. The question they attempted to answer -what does it mean to be modern? -is as much in contention now as it was at the beginning of the twentieth century. The concepts of modernism are still present in the Western aesthetic at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The search for elegance in fashion at the start of the new millennium reflects the concerns and debates of the early modern period as they are revealed in fashions from the Tirocchi shop. Although their elaborate Art Deco fabrics and often exuberant ornamentation may have come to look less and less "modern" as the century progressed, among them are many garments that could be worn with great pride today.

The author wishes to thank Professor Emerita Lorraine Howes, Rhode Island School of Design, for her helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.