About EP

The Elegantly Papered Vintage Fashion Magazine Archive is a curated archive of magazines, fashion lookbooks, printed ephemera and books spanning over a 150 years. The archive’s primary theme is fashion with substantial complementary collections of esoteric arts, counterculture, and media titles that range from extremely rare runs of pre-WWI Vogue, to complete series of genre-defining titles like Town, Nova, Queen and Fleur Cowles’ Flair.

We are passionate about magazines, their history, and their role in shaping and being shaped by popular culture, and we have spent decades building a unique collection that has become one of the most comprehensive fashion reference resources globally. We are regularly consulted by prominent creatives and top-tier fashion brands who come to us to access over 1000 titles from 150 years of history with rare content that they simply cannot find and compare anywhere else.

We would like to see the archive grow and to be studied for its potential. We believe that our substantial physical collections and unique digital database to compare magazine titles from many decades of history creates unrivalled opportunities for learning with an unlimited potential for new research and analysis.

There is a small taste of the collections on the ElegantlyPapered.com website but it does not represent the entire archive. There are close to 1000 magazines listed and the archive contains over 100,000. We have a larger Ebay shop with several thousand magazines partially displayed.

We welcome enquiries as we can search our entire stock using a unique visual and metadata driven database we have created and developed - Everything we have ever written over the past 18 years about our magazines current and previously owned and their contents with contributors has been keyworded and saved within this database.

Our offices are based in Kent on the South East coast of the UK, close to London, Dover and the Eurostar.

Archiving, cataloguing and consultancy keep us busy. Often a simple request can lead to us unearthing more suggestions from a wide range of sources.

The archive can be visited by private appointment and we welcome enquiries.

Elegantly Papered  

2023