Murata Manufacturing supplied the NFC tags for a limited edition photobook handed to guests at Yuima Nakazato’s Paris Haute Couture Week 2026 show, turning a printed keepsake into a doorway to the designer’s digital content. Murata confirmed its sponsorship of the NFC Photobook Project on 9 July, the day after Nakazato presented his autumn/winter 2026-2027 couture collection.
The book carries photographs Nakazato took in the Canary Islands, the trip that shaped the collection. Holding a smartphone over the embedded tag opens a dedicated website with show footage and related material, so recipients could keep exploring the collection during the week and after it closed. Murata gives the tag as 13.56 MHz with a communication distance of a few centimetres, standard for near field communication.
The collection, titled Sea of Fire INFERNO and shown on 8 July, took its cue from the black volcanic cliffs and dark water of Tenerife. Garments shifted from blue to red on the runway, borrowing from monogi, the onstage costume change used in Noh and Kyogen theatre. Epson and YKK worked on it alongside Murata. July also marked ten years since Nakazato joined the official Paris couture calendar, still the only Japanese house on it.
Why an NFC tag rather than a printed QR code
Murata’s stated design argument is straightforward. The tag does its job without appearing on the page, so no visible 2D barcode has to compete with the photography. A printed code needs to be sized for reliable scanning and placed somewhere it will not wreck the layout. An NFC inlay sits inside the paper and leaves the artwork alone. On a shipping label that is a detail; on a photobook meant to work as an object, it is the point.
The other half of the case is the reader. Current iPhones and mainstream Android handsets read NFC natively, and iOS has supported background tag reading since iOS 13, so in most cases there is no app to install and nothing to launch. That is what makes a tag workable as a fashion week giveaway, where nobody will download software to look at a book handed to them on the way out.
Paper is a harder substrate than it looks
Getting an HF inlay into a bound book is a tougher piece of engineering than a garment hangtag. The reasons below are general RFID practice, not anything Murata has said about this particular build.
- An HF antenna is tuned against everything near it, so coated stock, adhesive and moisture in the paper all shift the resonant frequency.
- Metallic ink, foil blocking and gilded page edges are common in high end print and will detune or simply shield an antenna, so tag placement has to be agreed with the print finisher, not bolted on afterwards.
- Binding, pressing and trimming stress the inlay, and a cracked antenna loop or broken IC bond cannot be repaired once the book is glued.
Murata has not published a part number, IC vendor, memory size or antenna geometry, and has not said which NFC Forum tag type the inlay uses. Broadly, a tag used this way carries an NDEF record holding a URL, which is what lets a phone open the site with nothing in between.
Where this sits in fashion’s wider NFC push
Murata’s own framing is that RFID “is increasingly being used as a means of connecting physical objects and information” across manufacturing, logistics, retail and fashion, with traceability, product authentication and distribution channel management among the applications. The company says the collaboration shows how electronic component expertise can “create new value” and “enhance experiential value across a wide range of fields.”
That is more than sponsorship copy, because the same 13.56 MHz tag class is being asked to do several jobs in fashion at once. Brands already use NFC for authentication and resale verification, and the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation is pushing textiles towards item level Digital Product Passports, which need a persistent machine readable carrier on the product. A tag that opens a show film today is the same class of device that will hold a garment’s compliance record tomorrow, which is a fair argument for reading a couture giveaway as a pilot rather than a stunt.
