What Richard Avedon Taught Ron Howard About Fashion

Ron Howard has been to “exactly one” fashion show in his life, and he couldn’t tell you the designer. “I’m not great at this!” says the Oscar-winning director with an affable laugh. “Fashion is not my area.”

Calling into W from his California office, Howard sounds like everybody’s dad, which—at least culturally—he is. A child sitcom actor turned acclaimed director, Howard is responsible for indelible American movies like Apollo 13 and How the Grinch Stole Christmas, box office hits like Splash, cult-favorites like Arrested Development, and a series of documentaries about The Beatles and Jim Henson that consider how genius happens—and how it always hits a limit without a human spirit to keep it in check.

But when Howard decided to explore this same theme through the lens of photographer Richard Avedon, he hit a small, stiletto-inflicted snag: “I don’t know very much about the fashion world,” or, he admits, how photographers and models can build entire universes in a single unmoving frame. “My daughter Bryce has tried to tell me,” he says, referring to the actress Bryce Dallas Howard, who has modeled for image-makers like Ellen von Unwerth and Norman Jean Roy. “I’m not sure dads listen to their daughters that much, but I get it now.”

Viewers of Avedon, the 104-minute documentary out today on Netflix, will come away with the same education. Howard seamlessly shuffles Avedon’s still photographs into interviews with luminaries like Calvin Klein, Twiggy, Penelope Tree, and Tina Brown. (“Wasn’t she so great in it?!” Howard asks with football-coach enthusiasm of the storied editor. “I love her line, ‘You’ve got to bite the hand that needs you.’”) He also reckons with the way Avedon, who worked as a photographer from 1944 until his death in 2004, moved between high-profile magazine work with Marilyn Monroe, Bob Dylan, and Gisele and documentary images that showed Americans the segregated South, a generation of abandoned war veterans, and the lives of child farmworkers.

“I often use these [documentary] projects as a way to better understand the world,” Howard says of his approach.

“My lack of knowledge—I often find it to be really useful when I delve into a subject, whether it's scripted or a doc. What I really do is share what it is I've learned with audiences.” He was especially intrigued that he knew Avedon’s imagery—teenage Brooke Shields in her Calvin Klein jeans; Janis Joplin with a leaden expression and an airy bell-sleeved blouse; Sharon Stone nearly whacking Clint Eastwood with a bejeweled clutch as she waved on the Oscars red carpet—but wasn’t aware that the same person was behind the camera the whole time.

An early visit to Avedon’s archives at MoMA helped hatch the plan for the film, which traces the photographer’s journey from Merchant Marine to fashion royalty.

“I don't really believe in ghosts haunting me,” Howard says of his visit to Avedon’s most personal creative work. “My daughters, Paige, Jocelyn, and Bryce, are pretty witchy, as is my wife. So they’d have a different experience in the archives, I think. But for me, what I did begin to feel in the archives is a connection between Avedon and some people, alive and dead, who've been very meaningful in my life and whose company I really, really enjoy. His energy was so different from mine. He was highly extroverted, you know? These are qualities that I don't quite have, but I admire them.”

He also began to connect Avedon’s fashion work with the painstaking magic of movie-making. “I never thought of the great still photographers as directors, as choreographers of story and narrative,” Howard admits. That changed for him during the making of this film. Meeting models like Penelope Tree, he says, “made me realize they’re performers…I began to understand that they're creating characters and playing scenes and moments.” He pauses a moment. “Is that a little bit obvious to you?” he asks. “I know. I know. But even in a world that is as adjacent to mine, I could go through my lifetime without understanding what it takes to make a great fashion moment.”

Now, Howard says, he gets it. Mostly. “I will say, I still dress the same. Every once in a while, fashion rotates to a point where I'm right in step, and then the clock keeps ticking,” he says. “But every 10 or 12 years, I look like I'm dialed right in.”