Bianchini began purchasing designs from Robert Bonfils in 1920. Also an illustrator and exhibitor at the salons of the Société des Artistes Décorateurs from 1912 onwards, Bonfils, like Martin, was a frequent contributor to French fashion magazines, including the Gazette du Bon Ton and Modes et Manières d'Aujourd'hui. Bonfils designed everything from textiles with exotic and tropical themes to tiny floral prints for Bianchini, Férier. A silk from the Lyon group at RISD bears Bonfils's design of horsemen, printed on a damask designed by Raoul Dufy and dating to about 1920 [fig. 160]. Some of the other artists employed by Bianchini included Russian avant-garde painter Paul Mansouroff; painter/illustrators Georges Barbier, E. A. Seguy, and Henri Gillet; and decorative artists Madeleine Lagrange and Jules Leleu.

Meanwhile, other companies became interested in modernist fabrics. François Ducharne, a merchant who had been selling Lyon silks in Paris and the United States, decided in 1920 to found his own factory and to use modernist methods. He hired the talented weaver Michel Dubost as head of the studio. Dubost was a specialist in brocaded textiles and other patterned weavings and a former professor of design. No doubt inspired by Poiret's school, which Dubost and his students visited annually, this atelier was also structured as a "school for designers," but limited to textile applications.(20) Dubost hired young men and women without formal artistic training and put them in a Paris studio deliberately located in the artists' quarter of Montmartre, where they came in contact with such figures as the writers Gabrielle Colette and Romain Rolland and couturier Madeleine Vionnet, all of whom were brought to the studio by Ducharne. At first Dubost himself did much of the designing for production in Lyon, but the heavy, often stiff silks with large patterns that were his specialty gradually fell out of style in the mid-1920s with the advent of short skirts and the chemise silhouette. Printed silks took on a great importance, and Ducharne was quick to establish the company in this area. By the late 1920s, styles had changed again. Dresses became streamlined, cut on the bias so that they clung to and moved with the body. These required very lightweight fabrics such as crepes, crepes de Chine, and tissue satins. As the 1930s progressed, Soieries F. Ducharne produced more and more prints in medium and small scales, including many for couturieres such as Madeleine Vionnet and Elsa Schiaparelli.

The Tirocchi collection includes several silks that illustrate how these fashion changes affected the Ducharne firm. Anna Tirocchi began buying silks through Ducharne's New York office in 1930, but she visited the company in Paris during either or both of her trips in 1924 and 1926-27. Marginal notes in Ducharne's sample books at the Musée des Tissus de Lyon show that other suppliers with whom Anna dealt were also purchasing designs from this company, so that she may have obtained the earlier examples from Harry Angelo Company or B. Altman in New York. From Ducharne's winter collection of 1922, she purchased a bolt of purple velvet on silver lamé in a large modernist pattern attributed to Dubost and abstracted from a typical Renaisssance velvet design. It was a favorite of François Ducharne, who gave an example in orange and gold to the Musée des Tissus de Lyon in the same year [fig. 161]. This large pattern typifies products of his design studio at this early date and mirrors the production of other Lyon companies. Also found in the Tirocchi shop were a number of Ducharne silks dating to 1930, all of them printed. These silks are fluid, lightweight fabrics, such as a chevron-patterned tissue silk velvet that appeared in a Ducharne sample book of 1930 and a bolt of black silk crepe de Chine with polychrome roses discharge-printed on a black ground [fig. 162], billed to Anna by Ducharne in 1930.(21) The lightness of the fabrics made them suitable for the new, draped styles, while their smaller patterns and realistic flowers show a turning away from the "moderne" style that had appeared in the 1920s.