After hours: Shoreditch in the swing of things

It's Annette Bette, my best friend, fellow burlesque dancer and Shoreditch Radio co-host.

Although we've only known each other a year it seems to us that we are made out of the same dotty DNA so we call ourselves "The Coquette Sisters".

"Guess who I've just seen in The Kooples advert on the side of a bus?" she says. It turns out that the man Annette and another friend, Harriet, had a ménage à trois with on Friday was not a single man. He is in an ad campaign with his girlfriend in the most brazen place possible - on the side of a bus in Oxford Circus.

"I should post on his Facebook - 'Hi Koople thanks for the steamy troople on Friday'."

Friday was a good one. Well, Annette, Harriet, Neanderthal and I made it good. Neanderthal is my boyfriend. I pretend that I first saw his dark, virile physique languishing in a skip and rescued him by bringing him home and dressing him like a gentleman and keeping him as a sex slave. We have a few more role-play characters but this is my favourite and most real to me.

So Harriet and I pulled Annette up onto the bench we were dancing on, because her Fifties-style red wiggle dress was so tight she couldn't lift her leg. Then a gangly, quite sweet-faced man joined us and started gabbling something to Annette.

"You have the same name as my brother - we'll have to call you Romeo!" They then played a few flirtatious games of chase around the room while Harriet and I tried to be sociable with all the other Shordos (Shoreditch dwellers).

I was sitting on Neanderthal's lap, twisting his beautiful mustard coloured woollen tie around my finger, exchanging some drunken and very vulgar comments, when I realised that I hadn't seen Annette for at least half an hour. Grabbing Harriet out of the kitchen she'd been snooping in for more booze, we searched for Annette in all the rooms. The third room we went in held the incriminating answer. I laughed hysterically at the position we found the pair in and walked out of the room. Turning back to share my amusement with Harriet, I realised that she was still in there.

I told Neanderthal what I thought they were up to and we decided to have a peek through the door.

The two girls seemed to have got bored with Romeo and were more interested in each other. It made me feel I was not to be out-sexed.

So Neanderthal and I did what we do very well a few floors up from the party on an old factory conveyor belt.

Romeo didn't seem to be up to either of my friends' standards. "Diminishing" was one of the descriptions they used and when he asked Annette when he'd see her again, she replied: "How about never?" But then later that week - along came the bus.

With her startling resemblance to Dita Von Teese, it's no surprise that 23-year-old Millicent Binks says: "I have always been a huge fan of Dita."

Millicent is London's own queen of burlesque, regularly performing at the capital's top cabaret nights such as Le Rêve at Café de Paris in Piccadilly and Die Freche Muse in Dalston and at Londoners' retreats - the decadent White Blackbird country-house parties.

Recognised on the cabaret scene across Europe, Millicent also has a burlesque residency in Istanbul and has performed with Von Teese herself at the Casino de Paris in Paris. She lives in Spitalfields and, in her spare time, she says: "We like to go to swingers' parties because I like pretty girls."

"I enjoy the naughtiness of burlesque," says Millicent. And, combining her skill for costume design with her "love for ballet and dance", Millicent's act shows off her "Forties siren" style.

She has also modelled for lingerie brand Agent Provocateur and co-hosts a show on Shoreditch Radio with fellow burlesque star and actress Annette Bette. Together "Binksy and Bette" are known as The Coquette Sisters. "We talk about fashion, tell naughty stories and play nostalgic tracks." Now she'll be letting us into her life every week on these pages.

Jasmine Gardner