Abstract shapes are often seen in the Tirocchi textiles. Perhaps the most beautiful and complex fabric found in the Tirocchi shop is a silver lamé with exquisite "cubist" pattern [cover and fig. 179]. The "leaves" are mere suggestions of natural forms, combined in a manner that denies realistic perspective, but they create a kaleidoscope of shapes and colors, much as do Henri Le Fauconnier's swirls in his Mountaineers Attacked by Bears of 1910-12 [fig. 180]. The unknown designer of the fabric has taken advantage of the fact that the Jacquard loom can lift each warp independently, creating the effect of scattered pinpoints of light where the silver thread appears on the surface. The blue dye of the ground has then been discharged with bleach and overprinted to create an abstract, modernist pattern. A dress trim based on abstract geometric figures exhibits simple rectangles and circles, which, while oriented in unexpected ways, remain in the band demarcated by the edges of the trim, a flat assemblage of forms [fig. 181]. Collage is the basic reference for a "robe" of red chiffon [fig. 182] with a skirt composed of separate leaves sewn onto a base fabric.

Two textiles based on abstract geometric forms show different ways of treating lines and grids according to cubist principles. A fragment of heavy wool fabric is marked by a linear grid and straight lines, creating an abstract composition in black, gray, and white. Probably from Rodier, it resembles the many identified abstract patterns that were the mainstay of this company in the early to middle 1920s, while its handwoven look is a Rodier trademark [fig. 183]. A printed organdy's patterning might suggest that it had been based on a simple plaid, but the straight lines of the plaid have been displaced and its grid splintered into fragments, which form an intriguing abstraction that nevertheless clings to the flat plane of the fabric [fig. 184], instead of emerging energetically like the optically illusionary Rodier wool. The organdy's abstract forms owe a debt to constructivist art with its painterly yet fanciful devices [fig. 185].

By the middle of the 1920s, modernism was firmly established, and French textile artists had adopted abstraction and flat patterning from it. Merging these principles with the intense colors first promoted by Matisse and the fauvists in 1905 and incorporating a taste for the hard-edged shine of a new "machine-age" aesthetic coming from America, French decorative design finally achieved its much desired new national style. The "moderne," familiar also by its later sobriquet of "Art Deco," is widely reflected in some of the most spectacular and luxurious textiles found in the Tirocchi shop. The "moderne" flower, actually derived from flowers drawn by Scottish artist/architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh in the 1890s, was adopted by French artists before 1910. This flower appears in many Tirocchi textiles, including "robes," laces, and printed fabrics. An unmade black velvet "robe" has not only the "moderne" flower, but also shows its debt to peasant art with its brightly colored embroidery of thick silk floss [fig. 186]. Another version exists in a stiff gold lamé cloth of about 1925 with patterning wefts tied into stripes of black, blue, red, white, and green Jacquard twill. By 1931, fabrics had become much lighter in weight, but the "moderne" flower was still popular. Another textile, purchased from the New York importing company of Harry Angelo in 1931, bears "moderne" flowers with hard edges typical of the more rigidly outlined "machine-age" imagery [fig. 187]. With its supple hand, it would have been appropriate for a draped dress with that year's fluid silhouette.