Japanese influence is also evident among the textiles purchased by Anna and Laura Tirocchi. Japonism in the Tirocchi holdings reflects a more recent development in the art world, but still one that predates the shop's existence. Japanese art began to filter into the West in the nineteenth century before 1854, the official opening of Japan to Western trade after more than two hundred years of self-enforced isolation. Japanese painting and woodblock prints, in particular, were collected by some painters and influenced the work of many others in the second half of the nineteenth century. Collectors such as Boston's Edward Morse and the great Parisian art dealer Siegfried Bing brought Japanese art objects to the attention of the public in America and France, inspiring the use of Japanese techniques and motifs - paper parasols, cherry blossoms, water lilies, grasses, dragonflies, among others - in metalwork, printmaking, and the decorative arts, including textiles. Japanese patterns for stenciled textiles were also copied and adapted by Westerners. Japanese influence is evident in the pochoir fashion illustrations produced by Paul Iribe and others after about 1910, with their large, flat expanses of color; black outlining; lack of perspective; and other abstract qualities; and is also evident in the kimono-style dresses produced by couturiers in the early 1910s.

Among the Tirocchi fabrics is a complex lightweight gold-and-black silk lamé, which has been dyed, discharged, and printed with a polychrome floral design in the Japanese taste [fig. 172]. A second textile of shiny brown silk satin has Japanese weeping willows and rippled pools of water in its damask patterning [fig. 173]. Several lengths from the Tirocchi shop were actually made in Japan, an interesting reminder of Japan's desire to reach Western markets in this period.

Many textiles in the Tirocchi shop reflect the styles of early modernism. A "robe" of about 1926 shows the strict geometric grid and stylized floral pattern so often seen in designs before 1920 from the Wiener Werkstätte, particularly those of Josef Hoffmann, Kolomon Moser, and Gustav Kalhammer for furniture, textiles, and graphic arts [figs. 174- 175]. Cubism also had its influence on fabric design, not only through its relation to modernist design principles, but also through the "primitive" art it drew upon for inspiration. Cubist admiration for the "primitive" emerges in many textiles of African and "exotic" derivation, such as a "robe" from the French embroiderers Maurice Lefranc et Compagnie with an embroidered motif and tassel based on North African patterns [fig. 176]. A bolt of silk velvet shows African shield forms combined with tiger pelts in its wide border [fig. 177]. From Bianchini, Férier came a snakeskin printed fabric with gold threads that Anna purchased in August 1926, one of many reptile-skin patterns made by several companies in the late 1920s. This silk fabric was aptly named "Fluidor"("Liquid Gold") by Bianchini, Férier to indicate its luxurious quality to customers. A staple of their line, the fabric was still being made in the 1990s.(26)

Also reflecting the cubist preoccupation with the "primitive," textile designers sought new aesthetic elements in European "peasant" cultures in the early years of the century. Paul Poiret was at the forefront of this search in France, having traveled to Germany and Eastern Europe and collected peasant art. Further impetus came in 1909 with the first Paris performances of the Ballets Russes, whose folk costumes, brightly colored scenery, and lusty Russian designs created as much a sensation as the panache of its legendary dancers. (Russia attracted further attention as a source when constructivist artists arrived in Paris after the Russian Revolution in 1917.) Many textiles in RISD's Tirocchi holdings have motifs drawn from peasant art. Several "robes" present such elements of the "primitive" as cut-leather sequins, wooden beads, and brightly colored ribbons. One silk textile displays the onion-domed churches of Moscow in brocaded patterning done on a Jacquard loom in a Lyon studio. Combined in a cubist-inspired abstract row, its buildings are flattened and lacking in realistic perspective, an exotic fantasy world of violent color contrasts in orange and green [fig. 178].