News
6 May, 2025
Burpengary’s vintage vixen
A BURPENGARY East resident who loves to live as if she was in the 1950s, is preparing to shine at Australia’s largest nostalgia festival, Cooly Rocks On Festival, as a finalist in the PinUp Pageant on June 7.
43-year-old Jacqueline Shapland, AKA ‘Sissy Southpaws’, is a longtime enthusiast of 1950s culture, embodying the era’s spirit with her carefully curated wardrobe and passion for vintage aesthetics.
“I’ve always been a nostalgic, romantic type of person,” she explained, noting her love for the art, fashion, and music of the period.
“My parents were always collectors and liked antiques and Elvis, so I was always around that sort of stuff and it was a bit of a natural progression to starting kind of dressing that way and doing a bit of collecting myself.”
The upcoming pageant is the culmination of over five years of involvement in local pin-up events in Redcliffe, Petrie, and Caboolture. Jacqueline emphasised how important these events are and how big this community is, even in Moreton Bay, providing participants a chance to be creative and make friends, including with vintage car enthusiasts, dancers and musicians.
“Pageants are a chance for us to hop up and express ourselves through our fashion and through a little bit of comedy, a little bit of music,” she said.
“They’re a way for girls to get confidence and it’s a really nice way, for those of us who enjoy the lifestyle, to create a little community for ourselves. And so that’s really why a lot of us do the pageants.
“It’s also just that expression, as a lot of us make our own clothes. So we put a lot of time and effort into being fun and entertaining and just sharing that entertainment and atmosphere with people.”
For Jacqueline, a lot of her outfit inspirations come from dolls or movies, with her having made one of her own outfits based on a nostalgia Barbie doll.
While not dressed in full hair and make-up in her everyday life, Jacqueline admitted her love for the era still shines through, with her style of clothing always being 50s inspired.
“For me it’s probably the most glamorous of the eras, in my opinion, as that time was very optimistic.
“The people, the culture, you know, the world was in that phase where everybody was kind of looking forwards and I think the fashion and the music reflected that attitude of the times.”
Jacqueline acknowledged there are a lot of negatives with that era, as with every era, addressing potential criticisms about the pin-up aesthetic with a powerful mantra:
“Vintage vibes, not vintage values.”
“Obviously there’s good and bad parts of every era, and I take what I like out of it, and I discard the things that no longer resonate,” she said.
“So just because I like dressing up in flouncy dresses and aprons and acting a certain way, doesn’t mean I should be subservient to my husband, or that I want inequality.”
As a final message Jacqueline emphasised the importance for people to connect over passions.
“I think that being able to have a platform where you can express yourself is what’s important,” she said.
“It’s really important to find your group and your niche and I think that’s really something everybody should try.”
Anyone interested in supporting Jacqueline in her largest pageant event to date, Cooly Rock On is free and will take place in Coolangatta on June 7.
More info at www.coolyrockson.com
