The pope’s gay tailor is making perfumes about sex, cruising and trauma
“What part of us continues to live on in the place where we were wounded?” questions the Italian artist and liturgical garment designer to the pope, Filippo Sorcinelli. With his latest fragrance VULNUS – ‘wound’ in Latin – Sorcinelli and his conceptual perfume house UNUM explore how the human body gives a physical form to spirituality, sexuality, sensuality and hurt: “A remark made at the wrong moment, a sense of shame inflicted in front of others, a caress turned into a threat, a judgement that ends up dwelling in our conscience with the voice of the person who uttered it.” Everything about it, from the distinctive bottle to the violent storytelling and the scent itself, is unmistakably goth.
The bottle is both an artwork and body horror. A visually shocking vessel made from a hyperrealistic rendition of bruised human skin, it’s indented with a bitemark from Sorcinelli himself on the lid. “That mark is a sort of intimate signature, closer to anatomy than to calligraphy, which is precisely why it interests me,” he says. That first chomp into the sample material helped to explain his vision to his colleagues, he adds, becoming a creative starting point. When asked on whether he finds beauty within violence, he replies, “beauty lies in the dignity of the wounded person and in the possibility that someone might finally pause to look at them closely.”
When it comes to the scent itself, a rusted iron note reminiscent of human blood lurks between the restrained sensuality of vanilla and resilient animalic leather. It’s a contrast of scents that represents the contradiction between conflict and the desire for comfort. After some wear, jasmine adds an unsettling dimension, with burnt caramel evoking “the moment when sweetness is subjected to excessive heat, developing a bitter edge,” says Sorcinelli. This journey represents the painful transformation that can happen in a relationship, “leaving the initial tenderness and the mark of what has happened to coexist in memory.”
Once the initial accord wears away through oxidation, there’s a sweet comforting respite at the end of it all, as the nose picks up on a combination of crème brûlée and the Italian egg-based cream liquor VOV. This is the perfume’s “most intimate confession”, Sorcinelli says, where “even a deeply wounded person continues to long to be loved.” It’s a welcome softness after brutality, like BDSM aftercare.
Sorcinelli’s ability to conjure up such a violent concept for a fragrance stems directly from, not despite, his religious experiences – spending a lot of time in the church requires a great deal of looking up at Jesus, nude, overcome by pain and pinned to the cross with nails through his palms. His brand UNUM, founded in 2014, is rooted in this kind of theatrical religious iconography, from Opus, a gothic fragrance based on laying the first stone of the Basilica, to Symphonie-Passion, inspired by playing Marcel Dupré’s church organ in Rouen. Memento, an eight-piece collection of eight whispered prayers and ancient blessings, has golden bottles where the lids are shaped like a priest’s hand giving a blessing. It’s all very dramatic, very Catholic. Then there’s the ones that explore sexuality – Quickie and Coffee is inspired by a sexual encounter in a gas station bathroom, while Cruising Area evokes ‘dark passages with moldy walls and full of ephemeral pleasure’.
Growing up playing the organ, Sorcinelli spent many hours inside churches studying how the air of the room and the human body harmoniously work together with the building to produce beautiful sounds. It was something, he says, that he would later come to recognise in the sense of smell and “the possibility that an invisible substance might touch our lives which ordinary language struggles to access.” In adulthood, he became a professional tailor, crafting sacred garments for the Vatican’s clergy, with notable holy figurehead clients including Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis.
It was through his work creating liturgical garments for his atelier brand LAVS that he started exploring the world of scent. “I wanted the boxes containing the vestments to have a recognisable scent but a broader question was also emerging concerning memory.” Through warm wax, lingering incense, wooden cupboards and the familiarly musty atmosphere of old buildings “where generations of people have prayed, wept and waited”, Sorcinelli discovered how specific smells held a uniquely strong power for accessing memory. He realised the intensity of these recollections was impossible to replicate through listening to music or looking at a photograph alone. Thus in 2014, UNUM’s solemnly spiritual debut scent, also named LAVS, came into being.
Having spent a significant amount of his life around artworks depicting one man’s torment, Sorcinelli is profoundly inspired by Medieval paintings and their ability to turn a wound into an event. He’s learned to notice the difference between physical pain and the humiliation inflicted by violence, and where it becomes artwork itself. “I am interested in a form of beauty that has the courage to face reality head-on, even when it shatters our desire for harmony,” he says, and for him, fragrance is akin to poetry with the skin becoming a “living archive”.
His fans and consumers can’t be pinned down to a single demographic; he prefers to think of them as “interlocutors” with their own stories and sensibilities. “Some possess an extraordinary knowledge of perfumery, whilst others have come across my work through a concert, an image, a visit to a boutique or the story told by someone they love,” he explains. “It moves me when someone writes to me to explain that a fragrance has brought back memories of a place, a person who is no longer with us, or a moment they thought was now beyond their reach.” After all, there’s not a single person in the world who gets through life without some form of suffering. It’s a strangely unifying experience.
For your sins, VULNUS is available for purchase directly from Filippo Sorcinelli’s website.
