Hepola: Dallas’ Met gala is DIFFA, a voyeuristic fantasia of style and imagination

“Every year I do a little extra,” said Gabriella Monte, disassembling her costume near the women’s bathroom. Monte’s look — let’s call it Hollywood noir meets glam witch with a touch of mermaid — was inspired by Hedy Lamarr’s crown of stars in the 1941 musical Ziegfeld Girl, and a wire contraption Monte wore like angel wings framed her long raven hair in a sparkly constellation.  

But negotiating a bathroom stall in this get-up would be another matter. “It takes three men to help me,” said Monte, part of the style board that helps throw this event (it takes a village). She smiled as one guy detached yards of ruffly black tulle trailing from her slinky black gown.  

House of DIFFA, which took place on Saturday, May 9, is Dallas’ version of the Met Gala, an eye-candy event where masquerade meets evening gown, chain mail meets black tux and a feathered headdress can never be too large. Around 1,200 people gathered at the downtown Sheraton for a fundraiser with a no-joke cause — DIFFA stands for Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS — but thrown with an epic playfulness that makes it a one-of-a-kind event.   

“DIFFA’s all about the fashion and the drama,” said David Chadd, a designer who co-chaired this year’s gala with David White. The theme was Hotel Mystique; guests entered through a burgundy velvet tunnel that felt like stumbling onto a secret. “I thought this mysterious hotel could become a dramatic event on the runway but also point to some of the mystery in the AIDS community, how people have to hide behind closed doors,” said Chadd. “It goes deeper than the drama.” 

DIFFA started in the early ‘90s when Dallas creatives joined forces to raise money for people living with AIDS. One tradition that’s held is a collection of bespoke jackets made by high-profile designers and auctioned for charity (modeled this year by students from Booker T. Washington High School). For more than 25 years, fashion event producer Jan Strimple, the Dallas model discovered by Bob Mackie, made the runway show a centerpiece, for which she received a DIFFA Dallas Legacy Tribute award on Saturday night.  

“Our intention was to take people that society said were unlovable and uplift them,” said Strimple when she accepted her award, still owning the stage in glasses and short-cropped silver hair.  

These days the runway show is produced by Robyn Chauvin with a crew of more than 60. It’s hard to overstate how elaborate it is: 80 models, 40 hair and makeup artists, 20 creators and designers, more than 175 lighting fixtures.  

Although DIFFA has the trappings of other fundraising galas — the photo stations, the live auction, the sit-down chicken dinner with its sad, stale bread rolls — what makes the evening special is the runway, an hour-plus fantasia of visual splendor that must be seen to be believed. Part theater, part avant-garde couture, part camp spectacle — if there is anything else like it in the city, I’m unaware. 

“Welcome to Hotel Mystique, where the past never sleeps and neither will you,” said the show’s emcee, Dallas drag great Alyssa Edwards, also known as Mesquite-born Justin Johnson, who rose to fame on RuPaul’s Drag Race. With her platinum blond fountain of hair and dangling chandelier earrings, Edwards ran the show like Joan Rivers mixed with Dynasty’s Krystle Carrington mixed with Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond. Seen it all, babe.     

The spectacle was a tour through the imaginary Hotel Mystique: a mix of celebrity and political intrigue in the lobby, the gangsters and molls of the casino, the Palm Springs socialites poolside and buff men pumping iron in the gym. If this sounds like a jumble of styles and storylines, it was, an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink aesthetic that included a 13th floor inhabited by ghosts, a gothic Marie Antoinette-Bride of Frankenstein vibe that sent dancers in gauzy white scrim twirling into the audience.  

There was a disco scene. There was an ‘80s-style aerobics scene that erupted into a hair-flicking, leg-lifting dance number. I forgot to mention that before the runway show, 2026 Miss America Cassie Donegan sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” That’s how much went down on Saturday: It slipped my mind that the country’s most famous beauty queen belted out a classic of the American songbook while keeping a sparkly crown steady on her head.  

There was just so much to see! A guy in a chandelier, a guy in a cage, a woman with a silver ship nestled in her enormous wig. This wasn’t a runway show. It was an experience. Apologies if you missed it, but hey, there’s always next year.