Designer Diego Montoya Is Any Top Drag Queen’s Secret Weapon

It didn’t take long for Montoya to start learning the craft on his own. When Montoya was around 10 years old, his family moved to Miami, where he began experimenting with altering his own outfits throughout high school. “It wasn’t until college that I started to really focus on design,” says Montoya. “My boyfriend at the time was a circus acrobat, and I ended up designing and making all of his aerial costumes.” It was when Montoya finished school and moved to New York in the early 2000s, however, that he quickly became enthralled with the Brooklyn drag scene: He felt so inspired by it that he began designing pieces for local queens, too. “I was blown away by the energy and raw talent of the queer community,” Montoya says.

The designer began collaborating with all sorts of queens—many of them friends of his—on one-of-a-kind ensembles, where he began to cultivate a signature aesthetic. “It was amazing because all of my younger influences—many layers of materials and embellishments I learned from my grandma, circus garments, the colorfulness of my ’90s Miami childhood—were able to be brought together,” says Montoya. One of his first famous drag clients, meanwhile, was Sasha Velour back in 2017: He made her a New Year’s Eve headpiece. “We knew of each other from the Brooklyn scene and shared a mutual love for each other’s work,” says Montoya. “Our first collaboration felt very natural and fun, and I went on to design her look for her season nine premiere on Drag Race.”