The possibility that customers in smaller towns were more involved in social-welfare activities is further supported by the long and distinguished career of Mira Hoffman of Barrington, Rhode Island [fig. 49]. In some respects, she fit the profile of the typical customer, residing with her husband William H. Hoffman on fashionable Rumstick Point in Barrington and belonging to such organizations as the Women's Republican Club, the Agawam Hunt Club, the Rhode Island Country Club, and the Society of Colonial Dames. She was far more active, however, both nationally and locally than most of those who wore Tirocchi clothes. A founder of Girl Scouting in Rhode Island, she was the state Commissioner of Girl Scouts from 1923 to 1926 and the national president of the Girl Scouts from 1926 to 1928 [fig. 50]. On the state level, she sat on the Rhode Island Board of Education from 1921 to 1932 and worked with the Rhode Island Infantile Paralysis Association. At the same time, this energetic woman was deeply involved in Barrington "social housekeeping." She founded the Maple Avenue Community House Association, a kind of settlement house for Italian immigrants, as well as the Barrington District Nurses' Association. She was also a trustee of the St. Andrew's Industrial School for Boys.(12)

Another way to examine the composition of the Tirocchi clientele is to ask who was not represented among the customers. Although Anna and Laura Tirocchi were themselves Italian immigrants and lived near other Italian immigrants, Italian names appear only once in the client books. In 1927, the Tirocchi sisters made a wedding gown and dress for Rochele Vervena's marriage to Ferdinando Tortolani. Her mother [fig. 70, p. 89] and father lived on Cushing Street, and the newlyweds took up residence on South Angell Street - both fashionable East Side streets where the Tirocchi clientele were clustered. Mariano Vervena, the Italian vice-consul in Providence, shared class and cultural connections (he was president of the Columbus Exchange Trust Company and a member of the Providence Art Club, among others) with other Tirocchi customers' husbands and was almost certainly perceived as socially distinct from the Italian immigrants who populated the West Side of the city, a predominantly working-class group engaged in unskilled labor, factory work, or skilled crafts such as stonecutting, barbering, or baking.(13)

That few Providence Italians wore Tirocchi clothing was neither an accident nor a function of poverty. Many wealthy Italians, such as the members of the Aurora Club, could easily have afforded the prices charged at 514 Broadway. Primrose Tirocchi pointed out that Anna had begun her career in Rome as an apprentice to a dressmaker with an aristocratic clientele and that Anna "aimed for the same thing when she came to this country." In the United States, Anna targeted wealthy old-stock clients - the American equivalent of the aristocrats to whom her Roman employer catered - rather than the newly rich. Primrose noted that "she would turn Italians down. Not that she was prejudiced; it's just their attitude and what they expected. Anna said she was just going to handle who appreciates what I'm [sic] doing." Anna Tirocchi's reliance on the patronage of the established elite was not evidence of social climbing, for she appears to have kept her social life separate from that of her clients. She never, according to former worker Mary Rosa Traverso, mingled with her clients either in their homes or at her vacation retreat in Narragansett, a summer resort popular with well-to-to Rhode Islanders. Anna Tirocchi used the power that her artistry, skill, and sense of style brought her to choose the class of people for whom she would work. The husband of seamstress Mary Riccitelli Basilico, who worked for Anna throughout the early 1930s, remembered that Anna turned away Italian clients even during the worst years of the Depression, and Traverso emphasized that it was word of mouth more than advertising (Anna advertised only in the Junior League programs) that brought clients to the shop door.