Artist and Her Used Prom Gowns Fly in the Face of Convention

Alexandria Allan tells everyone that Gypsies dumped her in her parents’ cradle. “You see, I don’t think my parents understand me,” she joked. “Or my neighbors. Or anyone else.”

That seems right, especially when she parades around in the used prom gowns she buys in thrift shops and cleverly dramatizes the formal dresses by attaching rubber bugs to them.

“Clothes are an extension of myself,” she said in an interview at her Huntington Beach home studio, where she creates what she calls her “terrible wearable” clothes and paints expressionistic and surrealistic art.

“Do you like this?” Allan asked, twirling and showing off the secondhand prom gown she bought for $30. It has rubber tsetse flies strategically placed on the bodice. “Isn’t this wild?” She sells the revamped dresses for $650.

She said that while she wears and flaunts her used ball gowns at such affairs as gallery art shows, most people buy her outlandish clothes mainly to display them, although she said a few people have been brave enough to wear them.

“I never went to a prom,” she moaned. “No one wanted to date me because I was too far out in high school. I was different. People call me Alexandria the Great. You know, they named a city after me.”

Allan and others are exhibiting their artwork until Thursday at the Brea Civic and Cultural Center under the title “A Playful View of Reality.”

Her unusual clothing art includes a coat of arms that is a coat with a number of arms. She has a pink satin jacket decorated with green three-dimensional frogs.

“I thought this was fun, so I went into shoes,” she said, showing a pair of shoes made from aluminum and springs. And she made shoes on such high heels that “it looks like you’re going to fall over.” They’re intended for spring and fall seasons, she said.

Humor is a big part of her life, she said, adding that it provides a way to communicate.

“I use this type of art to draw people in so I can invade their minds and make them think,” said Allan, who holds master’s degrees in speech therapy from USC and Cal State Long Beach. “Everyone knows I’m strange but very serious about what I do.”

In her other life, “the reputable one,” as she calls it, Allan spent 12 years in the Compton Unified School District as a speech therapist working with severely handicapped children. “That finally began to tear and drain me.”

Now, Allan said, she finds herself “a serious customer in the dime store of life. No one ever took the dime store seriously. There are very important items in there, like nail polish, chewing gum, curtains, washrags and all sorts of things you can’t do without in life.”

But her artwork is not all fun. “I work 9 to 5 just like a regular job,” she said, adding that she sells half of what she creates--to the delight of husband, Steven Allan, 45, a public defender in Long Beach.

Allan waltzed outside in her bug-laden ball gown, ostensibly to pick up the mail. “My neighbors think I’m strange,” she said with a smile.