Two seasons ago, the British designer Ashish made a couple of spangly, sequined bomber jackets. One went to Madonna, a stage outfit for her Confessions tour; the other went to a similarly fierce, but less familiar, disco diva, Jay Clarke.

Clarke, 23, is a bright, polite Central Saint Martins graduate from a “loving, 2.4 kids-type family” in Canterbury, who currently forms the axle around which turns much of Britain’s creative nocturnal hub. That hub is better known as London’s fashionable East End, and Jay Clarke is better known as Miss Jodie Harsh: drag queen extraordinaire, self-publicist without parallel and unrivalled queen bee of the party scene.

Just one year out of college, Harsh has an assistant, a publicist and a work-experience kid trailing round behind her. She also has two popular club nights (Foreign and Circus), makes frequent television appearances, dabbles in performance art and is loved by Alexander McQueen and Gareth Pugh, two of the biggest names in British fashion. She is in a DJing duo with the left-field publisher Jefferson Hack and has regular DJ slots at the talked-about New York club night MisShapes. Ibiza dates are in the offing.

In fact, Harsh crops up – DJing, hosting or just being – at every happening party in London, from the underground cool of BoomBox to the flash-bulb melee of red-carpet premières. She is the definitive star of the self-publicising MySpace generation, and greedy for everything that life could possibly give her. What’s more, she may just get it.

In the Petri dish of cool that is east London, a few figures occasionally emerge to give us lesser mortals a fuzzy understanding of what is currently hip (although I doubt any of those hip kids would use a word as totally unhip as “hip”). Harsh is one of them, because she takes new hipster values to the max: visual extravagance, gender-bending and self-expression through eye shadow, MySpace, Facebook, arty collaborations, DJing, shameless attention-seeking and hedonism. These days, inhabiting the underground entails exploiting the mainstream. As one cool-watcher puts it: “This generation of underground kids has made it okay to be aggressively on the make.”

At Circus, Harsh’s club night in the West End, the beautiful, fabulous freaks are out in force. Hack describes this generation’s aesthetic as “fantastical and superb”. For him, such clubs have a rare vitality. “I’ve been round the block,” he says. “I don’t want to sit in some designer bar. Places such as BoomBox or Circus are fun and have incredible energy. The best clubs in the past – Taboo, the Hacienda, Kinky Gerlinky – have allowed people to express their hidden potential. I want to go to places where you find that creative energy.”

Harsh was asked to host a regular night at the Soho Revue Bar after she held her birthday party there last year. “I MySpaced it up, and it was rammed,” she says. “All the fashion crowd were there.” The night has been popular ever since. On the decks this Friday are Kelly Osbourne, the menswear designer Kim Jones and the rising television star Alexa Chung – all of them Harsh’s buddies, and none of them a proper DJ. Harsh has taken the East End habit of getting everyone on the decks with their favourite records to new heights, mixing Heat fodder with super-hipsters: Sadie Frost, Alexander McQueen, Peaches Geldof, Daisy Lowe, Miquita Oliver, Gareth Pugh. In a post-post-post-ironic way, Harsh has even had a DJ battle with Jodie Marsh.

At the bar and on the dancefloor, there’s a scrummage of boys and girls in full dress-up mode, “with a ton of glitter chucked over themselves” – Harsh’s description of the lengths to which club kids will go for an extraordinary outfit. Weirdly, the table-service section of the club is packed with genuine squares, sitting goggle-eyed around their bottles in buckets, excited to be part of this colourful and confusing scene. Some even have their cameras out.

A film of Jodie Harsh and Miss Piggy frolicking in a lipstick-smeared, art-house sort of way is projected onto the walls. François from Switzerland is sitting seriously on a chair beneath the screen: jagged blond hair, leggings, tons of blue, glittery eyeliner, false lashes. He has flown in for the weekend to experience at first hand the Jodie Harsh phenomenon that he tracked down on MySpace.

Harsh is the apotheosis of the MySpace generation. She is ambitious – she already writes for various magazines, but a talk show, fashion and make-up lines, brand endorsements (she already works with Mac), acting, music and modelling are, she believes, completely within her reach. Kim Jones says he looks at what Harsh has achieved in four years, “and I think anything can happen”.

As an educated, all-singing, all-dancing stage-school kid with good manners, Harsh has more talent than Paris Hilton. But Harsh’s belief that she can do everything, and have a good time doing it, is remarkably similar to Hilton’s. The club scene is all about exhibitionism. Every night, kids fight for the right to be snapped by the Dirty Dirty Dancing photographer, who, if you look fierce enough, will capture your fabulous moment for the internet, where fellow club kids will ogle your web-star status. Harsh is one of the most photographed people on the website: her collagen-plumped lips and Las Vegas-bought wigs loom out night after night.

“Everywhere I go, everyone is wanting to get their picture taken with her,” says Diddy, a 23-year-old stylist based in east London. “If you get your picture taken with Jodie, then you’re a person to know. You see everyone swooning around her. She’s got this real air about her, like she knows she got somewhere from nowhere.” Harsh’s publicists say they agreed to take her on for a nominal fee because “she’s creating a brand that people are buying into. We get more and more calls from film studios wanting Jodie on their red carpet”.

“That’s the MySpace generation,” Hack says. “They are totally focused on taking the opportunity and moving on it any way they can. Jodie can make a career out of who she really wants to be. She’s got a strong image; it’s consistent. She’s super-organised. A lot of the people who operate in that sphere have great potential, but they throw it away on other things. Jodie is super-together, and for someone so young in that scene, she’s getting things done. She’s running a small operation there.”

Quite literally, in fact, in the form of her registered company, Harsh Times. The he-in-the-she says: “I would say I am a business person before I am a man who dresses as a woman. I don’t do drag every day – put me under the shower and I’m 100% a trendy boy.”

Harsh tells a story about a drag queen who, just a couple of years ago, while they were both doing the door for a club night, told her to “know your place is at the bottom of the ladder”. A year later, she says, “that person is f***ed up on drugs and nowhere”.

Harsh has been criticised by some for being a wannabe – not a good look in east London. “Obviously, I’ve Googled myself,” she says. “I’ve seen what they say. But I’ve got goals, and I’m clever with it. I’m doing well out of myself. Jodie Harsh is definitely supporting me.”

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