The designer-clad crowd were in for a treat at the Double Club, the restaurant/bar/nightclub designed by the artist Carsten Höller in collaboration with Fondazione Prada, where Congolese culture sits alongside that of the West.

Gordon Masiala is one of London’s most prominent sapeurs, a member of the Congolese cult that elevates high fashion to quasi-religious status.

The handful of Africans amid the venue’s predominantly white clientele certainly cut a dash as they danced to NKA Musica’s upbeat, guitar-based soukous. But it’s Masiala, the band’s peroxide-haired lead vocalist, who leads the sartorial pack in kooky Gaultier sunglasses, crocodile-skin shoes by Hugo Boss and a long man’s skirt by Yohji Yamamoto.

Masiala sings his largely self-penned soukous, rumba and salsa tracks in a soaring falsetto not unlike that of Congolese superstar Papa Wemba, with whom he performed in the 1980s. The latter’s hit song Hiroshima punctuated a happily shambolic set that saw Masiala deliver lyrics in Lingala and French while formation dancing with male backing vocalists and several wine-glass-clutching, unsteady babes from the front row. In between, he mopped his brow with —what else? —a Hermes silk scarf.