VISVIM TAKES ITS DYE VAT BEYOND MUD FOR YEAR TWO

Visvim does not buy its browns and rusts from a dye house. It pulls them from a rice field on Amami Oshima, Kagoshima Prefecture, where the mud runs high in iron and a craftsman wades in knee deep to soak each garment by hand.

That process, doro zome, carried last year's Isetan Shinjuku showcase alone. This year Visvim is opening the technique up. The 2026 edition of VISVIM HARMONIOUS PROCESS trades a single dye source for a full natural palette, plant matter and animal matter both, and puts fourteen pieces on sale at Isetan to prove the wider process actually works.

Amami Oshima's Iron Rich Mud Only Works On Certain Fibers

Doro zome, mud dyeing, pulls its color from volcanic mud on Amami Oshima that runs high in iron. Craftsmen there have used the technique for roughly thirteen hundred years to make Oshima Tsumugi, the island's signature silk, soaking wood dyed cloth in the mud fields by hand until the tannin and the iron oxidize into a near black brown.

The reaction only happens with certain plant tannins, which is why doro zome stayed a one note process for so long. Cotton and wool take the mud differently than the tannin rich thread Oshima weavers developed the technique around, and Visvim has spent years working around that limit rather than ignoring it. Widening this year's exhibition to a full natural dyeing lineup, using dye sources beyond the specific plants that react with Amami mud, is the brand finally building past that ceiling instead of repeating the same fabric trick on new silhouettes.

Hiroki Nakamura Already Widened The Palette Once

Hiroki Nakamura spent eight years designing for Burton Snowboards in Japan before he founded Visvim in 2001, and natural dyeing has followed nearly every collection since. Finally Offline covered the Visvim Motors Club 2026 lookbook in July, the WMV capsule Nakamura builds around his own vintage car and motorcycle habit, and that release already leaned on natural indigo dyeing and boro patchwork built from Kurume Kasuri weaving rather than doro zome mud.

Harmonious Process is the version of that instinct that gets a booklet. Visvim is distributing a 24 page, full color, B5, saddle stitch booklet titled Addendum to the Dissertation slash Natural Dyeing at the exhibition, documenting the manufacturing process behind the pieces on sale, in limited quantities while supplies last. The exhibition photography is credited to Keisuke Fukamizu. It is Nakamura's version of showing the receipts instead of just the finished jacket.

Nine Pieces Carry An N.D. Tag, Two Still Say Mud

The caption lists fourteen items releasing at Harmonious Process 2026, and nine of them carry an N.D. tag for natural dye rather than mud, among them the Skagway Hi boot, the Fisherman and Cowichan hand knits, and three crash finished Jumbo sweats. Two items, the Fluxus 03 wide cords and the 101X jacket cords, keep the older Mud OD designation, so the drop runs doro zome and the new natural dye process side by side rather than one replacing the other.

The exhibition runs September 2 through September 15, ten in the morning to eight at night daily, on the first floor of Isetan Shinjuku's Men's Building, the same stage space the Harmonious Process series has used before. A separate Men's Creators counter on the sixth floor handles sale specifics for shoppers who want details past what the booklet covers.

This Is The Second Year Of The Same Dissertation

Visvim ran the first Harmonious Process at Isetan Shinjuku in September 2025 as a mud only exhibition, the same year the brand marked its 25th anniversary. A year later the dissertation series has widened rather than repeated itself, the same pattern Finally Offline traced in June, when Visvim's Copa shirt turned up in one hundred percent silk with bone buttons. Nakamura keeps trading one material constraint for a harder one instead of settling into a signature. A silk shirt with bone hardware and a mud dyed parka come from the same instinct, refuse the easy version of the material.

None of this needs the mud disclaimer to work. The nine N.D. pieces prove Visvim can pull the same wabi sabi variance out of plant tannins and animal derived dyes that Amami Oshima's iron rich mud has always delivered, and keeping two Mud OD pieces in the same release is the tell that Nakamura is not walking away from doro zome, just refusing to depend on one rice field forever.