Thursday evening, in a 31st-floor suite bathed with late-day sun at the Carlyle Hotel, CULTURED and Valentino Beauty came together for cocktails, co-hosted by the magazine's Beauty Editor Emily Dougherty, to celebrate master perfumer and CULT100 honoree Fabrice Pellegrin.
High above Madison Avenue, guests (including perfume tastemakers Noel Thomas, Karina Bik, Roxy, Steve Garielastos, and Tiff Benson) gathered for an intimate cocktail hour in celebration of Fabrice Pellegrin and his new fragrance for Valentino, Sogno in Rosso, and a milestone moment: the first year beauty creatives were named to the CULT 100. Another guest of honor? Sensory storytelling. A bourbon cocktail kissed with a peppercorn rim echoed the fragrance’s spicy finish, while velvet divans and floor-to-ceiling windows framing the dusky Upper East Side skyline encouraged guests to sip slowly, linger longer, and quite literally breathe it all in.
True to form, Pellegrin fused unlikely elements with elegant precision in the fragrance. Heritage notes of black pepper were softened by Italian notes of milk foam, creating a scent that dances between couture and comfort, masculine and feminine, memory and mirage. One of seven scents in Valentino’s Anatomy of Dreams collection, Sogno in Rosso—“Dream in Red”—pays homage to Valentino’s origin story: a moment when the brand’s mononymous founder saw a woman in a crimson gown on the opera stage. That vision became his signature. Now, it has a smell.
As the evening slipped into twilight, CULTURED Editor-in-Chief Sarah Harrelson joined L’Oréal Luxe’s Sarah Curtis Henry in a toast to “the art of beauty,” honoring fragrance not as accessory, but as artistic practice. “Just as a painter lays pigment to canvas,” Harrelson mused, “a perfumer composes with scent.” And Sogno in Rosso—Valentino’s latest olfactory reverie—proved just that: a Roman sunset bottled.
As the Carlyle's windows softened into dusk, guests lingered in the glow of golden hour, wrapped in the atmosphere of perfume, memory, and Valentino’s signature storytelling.
