The Australian Home Journal – vintage fashion trove
The Australian Home Journal was a magazine mostly about fashion for the average woman. Each cover featured 3-5 outfits and inside were full-size paper tissue patterns and instructions on how to make them up. There were also more outfits illustrated inside, amd you could buy them by mail order from the AHJ pattern service. The rest of the magazine featured knitting and crochet patterns, fashion-related DIY and handy hints, short fiction, advice columns, recipes, and plenty of ads for powders and potions to keep you regular, make you slim, and keep your baby quiet. Celebrity news is limited to two pages on the latest film (and later TV) releases and a description of a star like Esther Williams or Hedy Lamarr’s latest outfit. The writing is often quite humorously snippy, a little al0ng the lines of today’s Jezebel.
There are lots of great period fashion hints to be had, including on how to accessorise.
The Australian National Library has a good collection of AHJs, from 1904 through to 1982, however is missing all the 1970s issues. Archive.org has some digitised issues from 1949-1952
: Australian Home Journal.
Tags: Australia, Australian Home Journal, magazine, vintage, Vintage fashion
