The fashion press corps is in Paris, but my heart is stuck in Milan. After a slew of newly installed creative directors dropped their first collections - Louise Trotter at Bottega Veneta, Dario Vitale at Versace, Simone Bellotti at Jil Sander - Italy's style capital was bouncing with POSITIVE VIBES. Which, to be honest, isn't always a given with fashion's professional classes. But more importantly, these collections, stacked full of leather, feathers, short shorts, loose suits and looser trousers, reinforced an idea of Milan Fashion Week that began in the '80s: this is show season's sexy leg.

Yes, I can relax, because Milan is still deeply, steamily, absurdly hot - and that innate horn makes it stand out. London is many things. Fun. Mad. Scrappy. But sexy? Absolutely not. Paris is the elegant one: sexy in its own way, but more of a "fuck you" passive aggression than a "fuck me" carnality.

That hotness isn't just confined to Milan, either; it's all over Italy. In Sicily, there's a combo of two schools of tailoring. The suits are relaxed, louche, but still lightly structured; a whisper of a jacked shoulder. Naples is the spiritual home of lightweight, easy tailoring. You've got the yacht lot in Capri, all linen and rippling abs and Swiss bank accounts. There are sportswear brands with a sort of grit-glam: your Filas, your Tacchinis, your Stone Islands. And, lest we forget, the more cerebral, bookish strains of sexy at Prada and Miu Miu - the stuff of rich lecturers and expensive-looking librarians, po-faced but prone to a wink down the economic history aisle.

It begs a question: why do Italians do it so much better? "Everyone else was stuck in period-drama cosplay [at the shows], and honestly, panniers and powdered wigs aren't giving me a hard-on," says Alex Kessler, i-D's deputy editor, who has more air miles than the foreign secretary. "Milan's the one that had me bricked up." For him, it's the way clothes are constructed, and the subsequent toppings: the leather, the slinkiness, the knits. "[Italian style] has always been about the bones, but the mischief layered on top? That's the juice." Italians know what looks classic on a man, but they know how to amp it up too.

On the ground in real life, there's a special sauce too. "Italy is a passionate place to live and work as Italians take style seriously," says Scarlett Conlon, a fashion journalist who moved to Abruzzo in 2019. She believes the interpretation of what that style is has been passed down from "generation to generation". "I don't think there's a siloed depiction, rather it's one beautiful melting pot of traditional, elegant and electric personal style," she says. "Sexy is, of course, subjective, but Armani, Gianni and Donatella Versace, Dolce & Gabbana and Tom Ford for Gucci in the '90s are the reference points. They all had different interpretations of what sexy looked like, [but] they shared an utter conviction and confidence that was exported all over the world. By virtue, Milan Fashion Week became synonymous with that - if a little stereotyped."

Even to an outsider, there seems to be a national duty of care and collective passion in Italy: sacred things that make your life richer, be that with food, or conversation, or clothes. I remember spooning a jar of Very Lazy garlic into a bolognese, and Francesco, an Italian friend, pinching the bridge of his nose like an exhausted father. A few years ago in Milan, a colleague ordered a cappuccino at 4pm. "Comeeeee onnnnn," lamented a fellow diner. "This is a breakfast drink. You are crazy!" Some things, like the right morning coffee and the call to get dressed up, seem enshrined into Italian law.

Apply that same thinking to clothes. There's nothing cooler than seeing a man in his 80s, slightly hunched, and in a precise blazer, shirt and tie. His thinning hair is still slicked back, just as it was when his moped was a chariot upon which hometown hotties giggled as they sailed off into the night of the 1960s. You will often see that sort of man in Italy.

This idea isn't static, though. As the cultural landscape flattens and homogenises under the digital bulldozer, my GQ Italia counterpart, Francesco Martino, has thoughts. "Fashion on social media has helped 'contaminate' the way people dress here, creating lots of branches that are common to many other countries," he says. "The sexy style is more a matter of tradition. In the past, it was much easier to get your hands on a well-made suit, one that embodied the idea of fashion with the right proportions. Think of Giorgio Armani. He worked for 50 years on the same concept. That kind of style was handed down to us, but not everyone has embraced it or welcomed it."

Maybe Trotter-era Bottega, Vitale-era Versace or Belotti-era Jil Sander will reverse the trend. And, with the passing of the great Mr Armani, maybe we should think about unbuttoning our shirts or loosening our ties and luxuriating in being a bit intentionally off-kilter with our clothes, as if they're just thrown on rather than mulled over. Like all the best menswear, Italian fashion seems to merely unlock an energy that's already there - a cool confidence, which is maybe the hottest substance there is. I have but one wish, then: stay sexy, Milan.

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