Forget Nylons, here come the Mi-Lons

Florence Welch recently tweeted from South Beach that she was on her "rollerskates, have Hawaiian shirt, looking for a piña colada and a palm tree to hug". Pete Tong provides the after-party soundtrack while darling of the summer festival circuit and Kanye West's favourite London musician, Mr Hudson, wrote the title track of his album Straight No Chaser about driving in the city at night. Meanwhile Mark Ronson tapped into the city's enthusiasm for design with his pop-up sneaker store.

Bigger than the music scene, however, is the art scene. For one carnival of a week in early December, Miami becomes the epicentre of the international contemporary art scene. Jay Jopling, Max Wigram, Simon Lee, Timothy Taylor, Tim Jefferies et al follow the sun to flog the world's most avant-garde, collectable and expensive works at Art Basel Miami Beach (Dec 2-5). A hedonist's paradise, why not stay for Christmas, or indeed till Easter? While South Beach used to be the preferred prancing ground of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, they've been eclipsed by a far more appealing crowd of paparazzi fodder: from Lenny Kravitz to Gisele and Tom Brady, Beyoncé, Jay Z and Miami basketball star LeBron James.

The partying is hard and if it's not a mojito, expresso martinis are the Mi-Lon tipple of choice for artists like Johnny Yeo. Art Basel Miami, which has eclipsed even the Armoury as America's most important fair, is held in a sprawling Fifties convention centre in South Beach.

Business is so good that even dealers like White Cube's Jay Jopling man their own stands, grit their teeth and grin at Floridians who talk about Damien Hirst's spots in terms of the colour of their sofa. My favourite overheard line at the fair is: "I gave my wife an unlimited budget and da-ya-know-what, she exceeded it." But beyond all this brash acquisitiveness is an irrepressible new place on the cultural map.

As Marc Spiegler, co-director of Miami Art Basel points out: "When the fair started, there was something attractively surreal about the idea of the city as a venue for a world-class air fair, because it was so improbable. But the injection of world-class contemporary art doesn't have an impact just for one week of the year, it's for 52," he says.

At the last count, 17 art fairs take place around this time, as satellites around the main event. There is Design Miami, in the design district, Scope, and NADA (New Art Dealers Alliance, haunt of Mi-Lon Carl Freedman) which takes place in a poetic ice house and has hammocks into which the art fatigued can collapse. One of Art Basel's most popular innovations is the shipping containers full of art on the beach ... that and the in-fair spa.

Now year round there's a gallery scene to rival Hoxton. The city's major museums, MAM and MOCA are so firmly established on the international map that they are both planning major extensions to their buildings.

"Miami really has changed from the stereotyped girls in thongs on the beach and cheesy Miami men'," says Mi-Lon Marissa Hermer, who loves Design Miami and is planning her husband's — Boujis founder Matt Hermer — 40th at newly opened Soho Beach House.

This cultural renaissance is a big part of a reversal of fortunes in the city. It was at Art Basel that Soho House threw a pop-up beach party for White Cube three years ago.

"Creative Miami, as opposed to shiny Miami," is what makes up Soho House's membership base, says founder Nick Jones. The Beach House is in Mid-Beach, a £50 million project, where Mi-Lons are transported to another world that's decadently reminiscent of 1940s Cuba. Waiters in sailor-boy T-shirts offer to "water your feet" to wash away sand before reclining on the sunbeds. (An idea of Mrs Jones, Kirsty Young, they've proved a big hit.)

Art Basel too, says Spiegler, owes its vibrancy in no small part to embracing the fact that, as he puts it, Miami is "the gateway to Latin America".

The snack of choice for Mi-Lons at Soho House's is suitably South American and affectionately known as guaca-rosé — a glass of rosé and guacamole. Santé!