Tirocchi customers demanded copies of couture clothing from Paul Poiret, Lucien Lelong, Jeanne Paquin, Redfern, and other Parisian couturiers. In the first years after the business was moved to Broadway, these garments continued to be constructed on the premises by Anna, Laura, and their workers, using fabric purchased in New York. Made-to-order dresses, coats, blouses, and petticoats were patterned on sketches of French designs published in magazines such as Harper's Bazaar or were taken from design books distributed by the fabric suppliers. With the advent of ready-to-wear clothing in the early 1920s, the shop underwent a thorough transformation. By 1926, the sisters were buying garments directly from the Parisian ateliers of Poiret, Lelong, and others, then altering them for customers or selling them directly, while also purchasing from suppliers in New York many ready-made models based on Paris designs. Madelyn Shaw documents in chapter four the American fashion scene, supplying the context within which the sisters carried on their trade.

What was the fascination that French couture held for American women? Part of it was the fantasy of Paris, the cultural capital of Europe, the apex of luxury, art, and fine living, home to cordon bleu cuisine, promenades in the Bois de Boulogne, fine architecture and grand boulevards, the newly constructed Opera, and the venerable Comedie Française and Musee du Louvre. From the early nineteenth century, magazines, newspapers, and novels were more and more inclined to present Paris as the source of all that was best in women's fashion, that exquisite and frivolous art of decoration used not only to make women attractive and seductive, but also, as Anne Hollander has pointed out, to enhance their roles as transmitters of tradition, imagination, and emotion.(7)

When Charles Frederick Worth descended on Paris from London in the 1850s, he was quick to take advantage of this reputation. Building on the idea that Paris fashion was superior, he declared himself to be the most talented of its dressmakers. With a flair for publicity and the ego of an artist who brooked no disagreement, Worth added to the Paris mystique the certainty that the name of the designer of a woman's toilette was all-important to her image and allure. American women such as Mrs. Potter Palmer, Edith Wharton, and Isabella Stewart Gardner became Worth's clients, bringing Paris fashion home to America and expanding its reputation still further.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Paris had also garnered a reputation as the capital of modernity with its new city plan of wide avenues according to Baron Haussmann and its profusion of recently constructed beaux-arts buildings. In the American mind, Paris was the site where the most rich and well-born from all over the world came to enjoy the high life, an experience that only Paris could provide in full measure. American dancer Isadora Duncan, welcomed into the salons of the intellectual and artistic elite after she arrived in Paris at the turn of the century, thought that "Paris...stands in our world, for our times, for what Athens was in the epoch of the glory of 'ancient Greece.'"(8) Even during the First World War, Americans still thought of Paris as "the permanent rendez-vous of aristocracy - an aristocracy formed of the diplomates [sic] of all the great Empires, historical families, renowned and glorious intellects, celebrated beauties, illustrious artists, eloquent ministers - born in every part of the world,"even as the elite were fleeing to Deauville and Biarritz.(9)