This work was funded by the Max Planck Society, the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant No. ERC-2015-CoG-682843, H2020-FETOPEN-2018-2019-2020-01 (OPTOLogic - grant agreement No. 899794)), and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) within the Emmy Noether program (Grant No. RE 3977/1), the Collaborative Research Center/Transregio 227 "Ultrafast Spin Dynamics" (project A09 and B07), the Würzburg-Dresden Cluster of Excellence on Complexity and Topology in Quantum Matter – ct.qmat (EXC 2147, project-id 39085490), and the Priority Program SPP 2244 (project No. 443366970). J.S. and J.M. would like to thank CEDAMNF project financed by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of Czech Republic, Project No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15.003/0000358. M.S. thanks the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for its support with a Feodor Lynen scholarship. S.B. acknowledges financial support from the NSERC-Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships Program.

We performed extreme ultraviolet (21.7 eV) multidimensional angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy for two different crystal orientations linked to each other by mirror symmetry, we isolate and identify the role of orbital texture in photoemission from the transition metal dichalcogenide 1T-TiTe$_2$. By comparing these experimental results with theoretical calculations based on both a quantitative one-step model of photoemission and an intuitive tight-binding model, we unambiguously demonstrate the link between the momentum-dependent orbital orientation and the emergence of strong intrinsic linear dichroism in the photoelectron angular distributions.