How Issey Miyake forged a friendship with Lucie Rie.  

In the late 1980s, he visited Lucie Rie at her studio for tea. So inspired was he by their meeting, that he organised a major exhibition of her work in Tokyo in 1989 and dedicated his entire 1989/90 runway collection to her aesthetic, in a show featuring her buttons, which at the time she was famous for. “Seeing some of her work,” Miyake told an interviewer in 2016, “I sensed that this is what it means to create — I remember feeling suddenly energised . . . ” Lucie Rie would have been a relative unknown entity in Britain, at least as a ceramicist. She would go on to become one of the biggest names in contemporary British Ceramics. Miyake finally presented Lucie Rie and her works to the Japanese public in 1989. Issey Miyake himself would have been on the stepping stones to success during that period also. A relative unknown, whose novelty and sense of fun had yet to materialise into the Icon he would eventually become.         

ref: Financial Times vogue.fr