LA Fashion Festival 2019 Debuts Matthew Rolston’s “Hollywood Royale: Out of the School of Los Angeles” as a First-Ever Untethered Virtual Reality Gallery Experience, Presented by The Mill
Glamour, high technology, sustainability and style come together in a unique form at LAFF19: a virtual reality gallery experience of celebrity photographer Matthew Rolston’s 1980s retrospective exhibition, “Hollywood Royale: Out of the School of Los Angeles.” Utilizing Oculus Quest, the latest in untethered headset technology, The Mill, an international leader in VFX and creative content, has authored this first-of-its-kind moment in Hollywood history.
From Michael Jackson to Madonna, from Prince to George Michael, Cyndi Lauper and many more, the portraits of Hollywood Royale comprise a literal ‘who’s-who’ of ‘80s pop culture, commissioned largely for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine and Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone. Matthew Rolston’s influential photographic approach will be displayed in a hyper-realistic three-dimensional virtual gallery space. Don a headset and take an intimate ‘journey’ through Rolston’s photographs, curated and guided by the artist himself, as he narrates some of the personal stories behind these timeless images.
Rolston’s Hollywood Royale VR gallery will be on display September 20-21 at the Los Angeles Fashion Festival, an innovative showcase for the very latest in film, innovation, beauty and retail. In accordance with the theme of its 2019 season, LAFF believes sustainability shouldn’t be a luxury; it should be a way of life.
Sustainability can be expressed in many forms, and one of them, according to Rolston, is “the sustainability of cultural memory.” Rolston’s photographs of the 1980s are highly inflected by the visual history of Hollywood’s Golden Age, and as such, help to sustain the cinema city’s traditions of high style and theatricality.
Featured Artist: One of a handful of artists to emerge in the 1980s from Andy Warhol’s celebrity-focused Interview magazine, Matthew Rolston has since become a well-established icon of Hollywood photography. Alongside such image-makers as Greg Gorman and Herb Ritts, Rolston was a member of an influential group of photographers (among them, Bruce Weber, Annie Leibovitz, and Steven Meisel) who came from the ‘80s magazine scene. Rolston’s work has helped define the contemporary aesthetics of American portraiture; his 1980s images are notable for their glamorous lighting and detail-rich sets. Rolston’s photographs have been exhibited worldwide and are in the permanent collections of LACMA and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., among others. The works in Hollywood Royale are exclusively represented in the United States by Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles.
Experience Producer: Poised as a cornerstone of LA fashion events, LA Fashion Festival (LAFF) showcases progressive ideas via an immersive cultural experience of film, retail, innovation, and beauty influences. Founded on the basis of inclusion, sustainability, and community, LAFF is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit platform produced by The kulturspace Foundation for forward-thinking creatives & brands to showcase collaborations and incite meaningful exchanges.
Immersion Producer: With studios across three continents, The Mill, an international leader in high-technology entertainment, content creation and VFX, is made up of artists, technologists, and makers for all media, working at the frontiers of visual narrative. Built on the bedrock of cinematic legacy and high-profile fashion commercial work, The Mill uses virtual and augmented realities to imagine and build the future of interactive and immersive experiences.