The Early Birds of Fashion Week: Visvim, Harbison In most people's minds, Fashion Week begins on Thursday, but don't tell that to the nearly 30 designers who are having presentations all day today. There were two this morning that were especially worth checking out: Charles Harbison, a former designer for Michael Kors and Luca Luca, who started his own line, Harbison, for fall; and Visvim, the cult Japanese men's sportswear label that is branching out into women's this season. Mr. Harbison is 31, and certainly going places. One of his color-block coats was featured in the September issue of Vogue. Standing in an event space in the meatpacking district, wearing a white tank shirt and talking a mile a minute, Mr. Harbison was ringed by his models, who were grouped by the hodgepodge of influences on the collection. There was "island minimalism," "colonial sunset" and "diaspora prep," all names that were intended to suggest a melding of cultures. "I believe in a four-pronged approach," Mr. Harbison said. That is, there were four main inspirations for the collection, which he listed as prep, an African diaspora, Yves Klein (for pops of blue) and Aaliyah. "Do you mean Alaïa?" he was asked. "No, Aaliyah," he said, "the singer from the "90s." Well, if you put all of that in a blender, as Mr. Harbison did, you'll still wind up with a collection for spring that looks terrific, but mostly you will notice the pieces. A blue silk dress with ruffles down the front. Black-and-white plaid pajama pants with drawstrings near the bottom. A satin officer's coat in navy linen and vermillion satin. Mr. Harbison has a good start; some of his fall pieces have already been picked up by Ikram in Chicago and Satine in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, over at the Industria studio, Hiroki Nakamura introduced his women's Visvim collection, which also happened to have a multicultural theme. He looked at the use of patchwork throughout different types of dress, including Western suede jackets, French country wear, Guatemalan textiles and Amish dresses. The men's line was started 14 years ago with the notion of creating sportswear with a combination of modern manufacturing techniques and traditional materials and natural dyes. The results (while typically very expensive) often look no different than your ordinary blue jeans or corduroy jacket, until you study the details, like hand-dyed indigo that highlights imperfection. "Our goal is not to have a flat product," he said, meaning something that looks as if it came off a computer. Mr. Nakamura's version of a fringed suede jacket, for example, was dyed with pomegranates and mud. His braided belts were made of thin strips of denim. The thinly woven bands on his floppy hats were made by workers from a village in Guatemala (Visvim had sent them 2,000 meters of hand-dyed yarn from Tokyo). And a couple of loose dresses were made of bandannas Mr. Nakamura has been collecting since the 1980s, the ones that were still produced in America, and soft as suede.