One day you’re creating sacred vestments for the Pope. The next, you’re selling a perfume inspired by a quickie in a petrol station bathroom. Welcome to the extraordinary world of Filippo Sorcinelli, the openly gay Italian designer who has dressed three popes while building a fragrance empire where Catholic devotion, sexual desire and the occasional questionable encounter coexist rather beautifully.
Some people keep their professional and private interests strictly separate. Filippo Sorcinelli apparently never received that memo.
The Italian artist designs elaborate garments for the highest levels of the Catholic Church. His creations have been worn by Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV.
He also makes perfumes with names like Cruising Area, Quickie and Coffee, Cyber-Sex and Popper-Pop.
Yes, really.
While most luxury perfume brands are busy convincing us that happiness smells like a Mediterranean sunset and a shirtless man emerging from the sea, Sorcinelli has taken a considerably more adventurous approach.
And somehow, it all makes perfect sense to him.
From dressing the Pope to smelling like a quickie
Sorcinelli is the founder of Atelier LAVS, an Italian workshop specialising in liturgical garments.
His work involves intricate embroidery, precious fabrics, religious symbolism and centuries of Catholic tradition. He has spent years creating vestments for important ceremonies, including garments worn by successive pontiffs.
Not exactly the professional background one would normally associate with cruising grounds and anonymous sexual encounters.
But beyond his religious commissions, Sorcinelli has developed an equally distinctive career in experimental perfumery.
In 2014, he founded UNUM, a fragrance house whose creations draw inspiration from sacred architecture, religious rituals, music and memory.
His wider perfume business also includes X SÉ, a collection with a rather less ecclesiastical personality.
And this is where things become particularly interesting.
Cruising Area: because apparently even anonymous sex deserves its own fragrance
Let’s start with Cruising Area.
The perfume takes inspiration from the hidden environments associated with anonymous sexual encounters: dark corridors, underground spaces and fleeting moments of intimacy.
It’s an unusual concept for a luxury fragrance.
Then again, conventional perfume advertisements have been selling highly sexualised fantasies for decades. They just tend to involve expensive yachts rather than questionable lighting and mysterious encounters behind closed doors.
Sorcinelli’s approach is different.
Instead of sanitising sexuality into something glamorous and universally acceptable, he embraces its atmosphere, contradictions and less polished surroundings.
The result is a fragrance intended to evoke an experience rather than simply smell pleasant.
Whether you’d actually want to smell like a cruising ground is another question entirely.
But you’ve got to admire the commitment to the concept.
Quickie and Coffee: an unexpectedly productive petrol station stop
Then there’s Quickie and Coffee.
The inspiration? A sexual encounter in a petrol station bathroom.
Because apparently stopping for caffeine and petrol wasn’t quite exciting enough.
The fragrance belongs to Sorcinelli’s X SÉ collection, which explores human impulses, experiences and desires through scent.
It’s a rather spectacular departure from the usual language of luxury perfumery.
Where other brands might promise romance in Paris or a sensual escape to the Italian Riviera, Sorcinelli offers something considerably more immediate.
A quickie.
And coffee.
Frankly, it’s difficult to think of a more efficient use of a motorway service station.
The collection also includes fragrances called Cyber-Sex and Popper-Pop, demonstrating that Sorcinelli’s interest in contemporary sexuality goes well beyond a single provocative name.
But reducing the perfumes to clever marketing would miss something important.
For Sorcinelli, fragrance is a way of preserving experiences, places and emotions that might otherwise disappear.
Even when those experiences happen somewhere with fluorescent lighting and a hand dryer.
The gay Catholic who refuses to choose between faith and sexuality
Of course, there’s an obvious elephant in the room.
How does an openly gay man who creates fragrances inspired by cruising and sexual encounters end up dressing the Pope?
For Sorcinelli, the question appears considerably less complicated than outsiders might imagine.
He has spoken openly about his homosexuality and his Catholic faith, rejecting the idea that the two must necessarily exist in opposition.
His relationship with the Church stretches back to childhood, when he became fascinated by religious architecture, music, art and ceremony.
Before establishing himself as a designer, he was also an organist.
Religion, for him, is not simply an institution. It is part of his artistic language.
That doesn’t mean his career has been free from prejudice.
In 2013, someone reportedly attempted to damage his professional relationships by informing members of the clergy that he was gay.
But Sorcinelli continued working in the religious world, eventually creating garments for three successive popes.
His career challenges the assumption that LGBTQ+ people of faith must either conceal their sexuality or abandon their religious identity.
He has chosen neither.
And while the Catholic Church’s teachings on same-sex relationships remain a source of exclusion and debate, Sorcinelli continues to occupy his own unusual space between devotion and defiance.
With an impressive collection of perfumes to accompany him.
His latest creation smells of blood, leather and emotional damage
Just when you thought things couldn’t become more unusual, Sorcinelli has introduced another creation.
His latest fragrance, Vulnus, was released in September 2026 and became the subject of a new interview with Dazed on 26 October.
Unlike the sexually inspired perfumes in his X SÉ collection, Vulnus belongs to a different artistic exploration.
Its name comes from the Latin word for wound.
The fragrance examines physical and emotional pain, vulnerability and the marks that relationships leave behind.
Even the bottle is deliberately unsettling.
Designed to resemble bruised human skin, it features an impression of Sorcinelli’s own teeth on its cap.
The scent itself combines elements including leather, vanilla, jasmine, burnt caramel and a metallic note intended to evoke blood.
It’s a perfume about emotional scars, presented in packaging that looks as though it has survived a particularly unpleasant encounter.
Not exactly the kind of fragrance you’d casually pick up alongside a bottle of aftershave at the supermarket.
But Sorcinelli has never seemed particularly interested in being conventional.
Maybe religion and sexuality were never as separate as we pretended
At first glance, the contrast between Sorcinelli’s religious garments and sexually provocative fragrances seems almost absurd.
But perhaps that’s what makes his work fascinating.
Catholic traditions have always relied heavily on sensory experiences.
Incense fills churches. Candles illuminate sacred spaces. Elaborate garments transform religious ceremonies into visually spectacular events.
Perfume, like religious ritual, has the ability to evoke memories and emotions without requiring words.
And sexuality, whether celebrated or condemned, has always been part of the same human experience.
Sorcinelli seems uninterested in pretending otherwise.
His creations move between spirituality, desire, beauty, pain and the human body without asking permission to cross from one world into another.
Perhaps the real surprise isn’t that a gay Catholic designer can create both papal vestments and fragrances inspired by cruising.
It’s that we still find those two things so impossible to imagine together.
After all, the man has managed to dress three popes while selling a perfume called Quickie and Coffee.
If that isn’t proof that life is considerably more interesting than the categories we try to put people into, we’re not sure what is.
And should you ever find yourself wondering what fragrance to wear to Sunday Mass, Sorcinelli has certainly given you some unconventional options.
Image: Instagram/filippo_sorcinelli
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