On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the LAVS atelier – Laboratorio Atelier di Vesti Sacre – Filippo Sorcinelli returns to the place and the fragrance where it all began, transforming his origin into material for the future.
In 2026, Filippo Sorcinelli celebrates twenty-five years since the founding of LAVS – Laboratorio Atelier di Vesti Sacre – through a project that brings together two moments of his history that appear distant yet are intimately connected: the fragrance born almost incidentally inside the atelier, and the family home in Mondolfo where that story first took shape.
Today, the new formulation of LAVS is unveiled: the fragrance that gave rise to Sorcinelli’s olfactory research, now rewritten through the experience accumulated over more than two decades of creative work. On November 26, exactly twenty-five years after the atelier’s birth, the journey arrives in Mondolfo, where that very house becomes CASA ORO – a traversable work, an archive, and a place devoted to the arts and open to the public. Two moments of a single movement spanning twenty-five years of work and life, leading Filippo Sorcinelli back to his origin just as his research opens onto a new season.
Artist, musician, perfumer and founder of LAVS, Sorcinelli has built a career that resists being reduced to a single discipline. In 2001, the Laboratorio Atelier di Vesti Sacre was born, initially in the family home in Mondolfo and later also developed in Santarcangelo di Romagna. The atelier’s work soon reached an international dimension, leading Sorcinelli to create vestments for Benedict XVI, Francis and Leo XIV, binding the name of the LAVS atelier to some of the most important ecclesiastical commissions of our time.
Within that same universe, almost laterally, the fragrance of the same name was born.
Sorcinelli had begun to scent the boxes in which the vestments were stored and shipped, wanting the work to continue declaring its provenance even once far from the atelier. The scent lingered on the paper, seeped into the fabrics, and was released when the box reached its destination. It was the people who received those objects who gradually recognized that invisible signature and asked that it might exist independently. That trace became LAVS, his first fragrance.
From that moment, perfume entered Filippo Sorcinelli’s artistic life and opened a research destined to develop through creations now distributed and known around the world. Alongside the tailoring grew photography, painting, music and performance, outlining a body of work in which different disciplines participate in the same inquiry into beauty, the body, the sacred, memory and human vulnerability.
The twenty-fifth anniversary therefore marks a passage deeper than a retrospective celebration. LAVS now belongs to Sorcinelli’s history and possesses the maturity needed to continue its own path, while the artist claims for himself an ever-wider expressive freedom.
“I fell in love with the Church very early, through music, art and liturgy. As I grew up, I understood that loving an idea and belonging to the structure that represents it are different experiences. Today, I wish to keep that love alive within a broader artistic freedom.”
The return to the origin thus becomes an act of awareness. Sorcinelli gathers a fundamental part of his own history, gives it a place and a form, and moves on toward territories where art, perfume, music, photography and performance can finally be read as expressions of a single research.
To return to LAVS today means to encounter the work that generated all of this, carrying the experience gained in the meantime. The new formulation arises from the desire to lead the fragrance toward a more intense and contemporary definition of its identity, respecting the character that made it recognizable while intervening on its writing with the awareness acquired through years of olfactory creation. It is the same LAVS observed from a different point of life, after its author has learned to know the material more deeply and, together with the material, himself.
Reformulating a work so closely tied to one’s own biography means accepting that even fidelity can take an evolutionary form. A living work passes through its author, registers time, and comes back to ask who he has become. LAVS preserves the memory of its birth and carries it toward a new maturity – deeper and more radical – in which the origin remains legible while the language belongs fully to the present.
The bottle is born from the same reflection, translating this relationship between memory and transformation. The body is still dominated by a deep black, progressively crossed by chrome gold until it generates a surface in which darkness and light seem to interpenetrate. The gold has a mirroring, almost liquid quality: it reacts to its surroundings, gathering fragments of space and returning the image of whoever observes it, making the bottle an object continuously different according to the light that reaches it.
The name LAVS (from the Latin for “Praise”), reduced and placed at the center in polished gold, emerges with the essentiality of a seal, while the entirely gilded, textural cap – worked like the precious tiles of his atelier – concludes the form with absolute luminosity.
Within this new garment remains the story of a fragrance born almost by accident at the margins of another craft and which, over the years, became the origin of an entire creative universe. LAVS, long called “the incense of incenses,” still carries the imaginary scent of those boxes that left a small Italian home and traveled far, at a time when no one could have foreseen that this very sign would open a path destined to continue for decades.
The new formulation comes at the moment when Filippo Sorcinelli chooses to look at that road from the distance needed to understand its meaning. Twenty-five years thus enter LAVS as experience, consciousness and transformation, while the mirroring gold of the bottle makes clear the most difficult matter to represent: time passed, when it finally returns to our hands and allows us to recognize, within what we have become, the living imprint of what we once were.
The universe of LAVS also continues beyond the personal gesture of the extrait de parfum, recovering the forms that, over the years, have extended its identity to the body. Shower Gel and Body Cream will bring LAVS to the skin through a more intimate rituality, prolonging the fragrance in daily contact with the body. Different forms of a single olfactory identity, created to restore to LAVS that environmental and corporeal dimension that has belonged to its story from the very beginning.
LAVS will no longer be as it was before, yet it returns to being what it was at first. From November 26, a new story will then be told: that of CASA ORO, the house in Mondolfo where Filippo Sorcinelli grew up and where the first nucleus of LAVS took shape – a house of memory, an archive and a space for the arts.
Photo credits: LAVS
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