Exhibition Review

	Anna Tirocchi sewing, c. 1915. Courtesy Tirocchi Archive.

In 1989 the textile department at the art museum of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) was contacted by Louis J. Cella Jr., a local doctor. The donation that unfolded from this initial query was to textile history what the recent discovery of Sue the Tyrannosaurus rex is to paleontology: an intellectual windfall whose rarity is surpassed only by its serendipity. During the first half of the twentieth century, Cella's mother, Laura, and aunt Anna ran a dressmaker's shop out of their home at 514 Broadway in Providence. In rooms on the second floor of their large Victorian house, the two women catered to ladies from Providence and nearby Fall River, Massachusetts, creating high-end apparel for every social occasion. When Anna (the main force behind the business) died in 1947 and the shop closed, Laura wrapped everything in tissue paper and shut the door. The inventory and records remained as she left them until 1989. Cella offered RISD its pick of the shop's contents, and for more than ten years a team led by Susan Hay, the curator of costume and textiles, sorted, cataloged, and researched the fabrics, documents, and ephemera found there. "From Paris to Providence: Fashion, Art, and the Tirocchi Dressmakers' Shop, 1915–1947" represents the fruit of their labor, an astonishingly complete time capsule of American dressmaking during the rise of modernism in the early twentieth century.

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From the beginning, the curators realized that the Tirocchi collection would appeal to an audience much broader than the museum's core visitors—well-educated, highly cultured residents of Providence's East Side, which is home to RISD and Brown University. Consequently, although the large, main room of the exhibition takes a somewhat traditional art-historical approach, focusing on the fabrics and garments that were found in the shop and how they relate to early-twentieth-century art and fashion, two smaller rooms—one at the beginning and one at the end—present the Tirocchi collection through the lens of social history and explore the lives of the women who made and bought the clothing at 514 Broadway.

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