Pimp your night

Clubland is big on dressing-up right now. From Boombox's Hoxton fashionistas to School Disco, clubbers are eagerly trying on new identities and abandoning inhibitions.

Now here's a new night with something extra: Pimp And Fluffy, a quarterly club evening at Hidden in Vauxhall. This is Carry On Clubbing for the Noughties, "ooh matron!" and all.

Tonight my sister and I are attending their first party. Earlier we buy tickets for £10 on the website; a list of suggested outfits ranges from nurses to the Navy and burlesque to Bond. Taking my cue from the club's name, I get myself up as a trainee pimp. For extra bling I dig out a Mercedes badge, "acquired" one dark night years ago.

Arriving at midnight, we're greeted by club promoter Hannah, dressed as a racetrack girl. She hands us each a pink pimp dollar. We can earn more by buying tequila shots, jumping on the dance podium or signing up to the mailing list.

Collect six and we get cheap entry for the next event on 22 December.

Hidden is spacious but not lose-your-friends huge. In the central room are sofas, the smallest of its dancefloors and a large bar. On either side are two large dancefloors, one with a second bar and a raised stage for the less inhibited dancers.

At the bar, a beer and whisky and coke come in at £4 each. As my sister goes to the loos to change into her schoolgirl outfit, I survey the crowd.

A guy in chain mail stands by me. Behind him a female Army cadet dances with a Twenties flapper; an angel in wings and a huge afro rollerskates past a man in a corset.

We rest on a sofa, and a man in a lab-coat sits down opposite. "I don't think he's wearing underwear," says my sister. It'd be rude to lean over and check, but the masked, naked guy dancing in a corner sure isn't.

The Pimp Room opens at 1am, with a DJ in an enormous Huggy Bear-style fur coat spinning his selection of James Brown, Parliament and classic Seventies funk.

On the room's centrepiece, a huge bed, a girl in stockings does the splits. There's a lot of bare flesh on display, but nothing sleazy about the good-looking and self-assured crowd.