Satisfied customers praised the sisters' work, but with more attention to their friends' reactions to the clothes than to the dressmakers' skill and artistry. Scholars who have explored the history of female beauty in the United States have repeatedly noted the tendency to encourage women to judge themselves by the way others see them, and the letters in the Tirocchi Archive corroborate this point. When Charlotte Robinson Luther wore a new Tirocchi dress to a luncheon, "everybody thought it was lovely." Luther did not offer her own opinion of the dress, or comment on its style or construction, but only her reflection in others' eyes. On another occasion she wrote from New York, "Having a nice time and my friends like my clothes very much - guess I look better than most people." Elizabeth Phetteplace noted that a dress and coat ensemble had "been much admired"; Lucy Wall referred to a dress as a "great hit" and "a great sensation." The clothes crafted by the Tirocchi sisters clearly played a prominent role in the social lives of these wealthy women, enhancing their ability to perform as expected of their class and gender. Rarely, though, did customers explicitly attribute the credit for their appearance to their dressmakers. Mrs. Wall was unusual in doing so when, in the letter cited above, she referred to the acclaim for her dress as "a good compliment for you" and wrote that her friends thought it had come from Paris, a comment sure to warm Anna's heart. Even so, Wall undercut the praise by using the possessive in telling her friends, "Our Anna made it for me," reducing Anna's status from skilled artist and autonomous businesswoman to servant.(17)

Indeed, customers had more than a whiff of the servant and mistress relationship about it, although wealthy women's dealings with their servants are rarely simple and straightforward. Despite the servant's subordination to the mistress, the cliché that "no man is a hero to his valet" would doubly apply to servants and their mistresses. Wall's use of the possessive may have put Anna in her place, but Anna's skills made her customers as dependent upon her as she was on them. Even one of the Tirocchis' most quarrelsome clients bowed to Anna's judgment when she wrote, "I don't know what I want - I guess I would be happy with either you decide as being best for me so will leave it to you to do what you think will be the best and prettiest and most appropriate for me." Mrs. E. G. Butler assured Anna that "I would be guided by your judgment." Out-of-town customers were particularly reliant upon the Tirocchi sisters to make decisions for them, but it is easy to imagine customers who visited 514 Broadway asking the same questions about the suitability of color, fabric, and cut as they looked at fabric samples in the billiard room. Emily Valcarenghi Martinelli recalled exactly this sort of scene: "They would say, ‘Anna, what do you think? I'm going to this wedding.' Or ‘I'm going to this so-and-so and whatever. What do you think I should wear?'"(18)

Even though Anna and Laura and their workers had tailoring skills and artistic insight that their clients may have lacked, these were women's skills and hence demystified, if not devalued. Most elite women did some sewing during their lives and had some understanding of the construction of clothing. In contrast, most elite men were not likely to share or understand the skills of an electrician, a plumber, or a shoemaker. Even though the shop's customers appreciated the Tirocchis' craft, their letters reveal that they often thought they knew both style and construction better than their dressmakers. Elizabeth Phetteplace was not entirely pleased with her "much admired" dress, wishing that "the rhinestone clasp was a little [better] and perhaps a trifle bigger." In fact, the most common theme of the surviving letters is complaint about style, cut, color, or construction.