Essays

Modernism and Fabric: Art and the Tirocchi Textiles

 

By the end of the 1920s, Anna Tirocchi was purchasing fewer and fewer textiles to make up and more and more ready-to-wear. The fabrics in the shop from 1930 on include many plain-colored crepes and satins, appropriate for the new streamlined silhouette that looked to "machine-age" designs, for Anna continued to custom-make some outfits, mainly for older clients. Not all plain-colored fabrics were unadorned, however. A sumptuous navy silk damask with a large pattern of floral cornucopias that harks back to seventeenth-century textile design came from importer Robert Gussaroff of New York around 1932 [fig. 196].

Printed silks continued to be an important part of Anna's textile purchases, but abstract "moderne" florals such as the one illustrated in figure 187 (p. 204) were giving way to traditional, realistic flower prints that had, despite modernism, remained popular all through the 1920s. The change to lighter-weight fabrics brought about an adjustment in pattern size. The large-scale, heavy lamés that prevailed in the early 1920s gave way to smaller designs, a decrease in the use of metallic yarns, and generally more flexible fabrics. Printed plain-weave silks and lightweight crepes were strewn with flowers in small motifs [fig. 197], unlike the elaborate garden effect of some 1920s floral lamés. Anna Tirocchi's selections were right up to the moment, and they paralleled developments in the French textile firms that were the source of most fabrics sold in Europe and New York.

A glance at the records of two of the "big four" textile firms shows how closely Anna followed French design trends over the years and how precisely her choices reflected the advent of modernism in French design. Bianchini, Férier's records have survived, including sample books and sketches from the date of the firm's founding in 1888, and cover the entire period of operation of the Tirocchi shop. From the beginning, Charles Bianchini had shown his interest in novelty. In 1889, one of the most interesting textiles in the Paris Universal Exposition was a design in which he rejected the revivalism that permeated the period, opting for a pattern of chrysanthemums in the Japanese "taste." In 1900, he was still purchasing Japonist designs, but he also chose patterns with English influence that incorporated the stylized plant forms of William Morris, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and Liberty of London. Modernism was already underway at Atuyer, Bianchini, Férier even at this early date. Charles Bianchini responded quickly to avant-garde design trends. In 1907, his firm's first peasant designs appeared, anticipating the move to bold colors that would be stimulated by the 1909 Paris performances of the Ballets Russes. In 1910, art nouveau was nearly gone from Bianchini's repertoire, with only three patterns in contrast to at least twelve in 1900. At the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, he was interested not only in patterns in Morris and Liberty of London styles, but also in bold geometrics with Wiener Werkstätte influence and equally bold flat-patterned florals.

Bianchini, Férier's "Grands Livres" contain swatches of the textiles that were produced from this early period, showing how modernism blossomed at the company. The company's books of printed designs, "Impression," begin before 1910 and show Charles Bianchini's wonderful eye for graphic patterns that could be used to create elegant and unusual clothing. Printed textiles were his strength, and these record books present one after another in samples measuring about eighteen inches square. The earliest books already display printed Viennese-style patterns derived from his cache of designs purchased in Austria. A floral related to Gustav Klimt's style appears in the very first book [see fig. 150, p. 178], along with patterns derived from exotic batiks from Indonesia, velvets with Persian patterns, and, more traditionally, indienne prints that reflected the design of eighteenth-century toiles de Jouy, derived from fabrics imported from India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Flower patterns are the most common, together with Medieval- and Renaissance-revival styles and the occasional Eastern European peasant pattern.

 

 

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