The Other Skin
A collection that pulls clothing and footwear into a single silhouette. Work with volume, cut and the behaviour of the material.
- Award
- 1st place, Start Up, Mercedes-Benz Prague Fashion Week 2013
- Photo
- Official MBPFW archive
Design and material studio · Brno
Hello I Love You
HILY is two authors working as one studio. Painting and a tool on one side; pattern cutting, construction and production technology on the other. From the drawing all the way to a packet a mill can knit from.
Markéta Šohajová · David Šohaj Minařík
01 / Studio
The studio is new, the practice behind it is not
Both halves of the studio have things behind them that actually got made: footwear collections, prototypes for Baťa and Pietro Filipi, patterns and production technology for outdoor brands, a bag label that sells, and a built interior. Alongside that, painting and our own software.
Two professions that meet only at the finished thing. The motif starts in the studio and passes through PIXEE into a packet the mill works from. Pattern documentation, fabric weight, yarn and tolerances are Markéta Šohajová's work, which she has also done for series production outside the studio. That is why we can take a thing from the drawing to a production brief, not just to a visualisation.
- Markéta Šohajová
- Clothing and footwear design, pattern cutting, construction, technology
- David Šohaj Minařík
- Painting, art direction, the PIXEE tool
- Tool
- PIXEE, 1 pixel = 1 stitch
- Knitting
- Matexline, Brno, Shima Seiki, gauge 12
- Production
- Locally in Brno
- Knit material
- Merino yarn
- Place
- Brno
What you can commission
- An original knit motif: the drawing, the mill packet, yarn and weight specification
- Clothing and footwear: design, pattern documentation, prototype, preparation for series
- Bespoke material and interior work
- Painting, and surface as part of an interior
02 / David Šohaj Minařík
Painting
Painter, MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In the studio he leads art direction and the motifs. He wrote PIXEE, the tool that carries a motif into the mill's stitches.
- Education
- MFA, painting, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, 2017 · BcA, painting, University of Ostrava, 2014
- Represented by
- Hans Alf Gallery, Copenhagen
- Exhibitions
- NOW / NO NOSTALGIA, Hans Alf Gallery, Copenhagen, 2019 · ME / Survival Kit, Galerie SPZ, Prague, 2018 · Exit Show, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, 2017
- Tool
- Author of PIXEE
- Research
- The Lossy Gesture — what happens to a painted gesture when it is translated into knit
03 / Markéta Šohajová
Clothing, footwear and material
Clothing and footwear design, UMPRUM Prague, the studio of prof. Liběna Rochová. In the studio she leads pattern cutting, construction, ergonomics and sewing technology. Beyond design she also does production technology: pattern documentation, prototypes and preparation for series.
- Education
- Clothing and footwear design, UMPRUM Prague, 2013 · Secondary School of Textile Arts and Crafts, Brno, 2007
- Teaching
- Head of the Clothing and Sustainable Design programme, SŠUD Brno (School of Art and Design and Higher Vocational School, Brno)
- Placement
- Anne Sofie Madsen, Copenhagen, 2015–2016
- Technology and production
- TILAK — prototypes, Gore-Tex and Ventile · WARMPEACE — patterns and technology · NEHERA — footwear technologist, production management · CYBEX for KONCERN
- Prototypes
- Baťa · Pietro Filipi · Essi
- Awards
- See Awards
- Exhibitions
- Designblok 2010–2014 · DOX, Prague, 2012 · EXPO 2010 Shanghai · Mess Around, Paris, 2012
- Own company
- Naranu studio s.r.o., the Airbō label, since 2022
Footwear from our own material
Heels and platforms made by processing textile waste: layered recycled textiles and resin. The ceiling of Café Konvikt was later made from the same material.
M. Šohajová — footwear, material from recycled textiles
Translating a painting into knit
A painting becomes a mill packet in PIXEE: an enlarged preview of the drawing in stitch cells, long floats marked, and an indexed matrix in which one pixel is one stitch and nothing is resampled. Plus a yarn map, a gauge and an approval sheet. The example below is 381 stitches by 569 rows, about 190 × 228 cm at 20 stitches and 25 rows per 10 cm.
It is knitted in merino yarn. We knit with Matexline in Brno on a Shima Seiki at gauge 12 and produce locally in Brno. The first knitted samples from Matexline are in hand. No finished garment yet: the first image on the left is a real export, the two visualisations on the right are AI concepts, not photographs of a knitted thing.
- Packet
- PIXEE, 1 pixel = 1 stitch, 381 × 569
- Yarn
- Merino
- Knitting
- Matexline, Brno, Shima Seiki, gauge 12
- Status
- The first knitted samples from Matexline are in hand, no finished garment yet
04 / Built work
The ceiling of Café Konvikt, Olomouc
Textile waste processed into a new surface.
The ceiling is processed textile waste. Markéta Šohajová developed the material from layered recycled textiles and resin. David Šohaj Minařík assembled it by hand into a surface that answers the baroque frescoes of the Jesuit convent.
- Approach
- Processing textile waste
- Interior
- Denisa Strmisková Studio
- Ceiling
- David Šohaj Minařík
- Material
- Markéta Šohajová
- Place
- Café Konvikt, Univerzitní 1, Olomouc, 2018
- Photo
- Kubicek Studio
05 / Markéta Šohajová
Technical textiles
An approach to material: upcycling technical textiles. A decommissioned fabric keeps the strength, the surface and the production marks it was made for.
Stratus weekender, Airbō / Naranu
Upcycled technical textile from decommissioned airbags. Design, pattern and production detail in a real product. Previous work by Markéta Šohajová, not a HILY product.
- Approach
- Upcycling technical textiles
- Author and co-founder
- Markéta Šohajová
- Photo
- Airbō, airbobags.com
06 / The studio's tool
PIXEE
PIXEE is a HILY studio tool for knit designers. You draw straight into cells shaped like a stitch, and the mill receives a checked packet for the machine programmer. It removes the distortion you get when a drawing is carried from an ordinary graphics program into knit.
- Drawing straight in stitches, 1 pixel = 1 stitch
- A palette of 2–6 yarns
- Export of the mill packet (mill zip)
- Files stay on the device, no sign-in
The example above: the Dense Yarn drawing, 380 × 560 stitches. At a gauge of 69 stitches and 84 rows per 10 cm that is 55.1 × 66.7 cm. The figures come from the mill sheet for this export.
PIXEE hands over the motif and the specification. The knitting program is prepared by the mill's technologist.
- Status
- In testing
07 / Awards
Awards
Markéta Šohajová
- Start.Up, Mercedes-Benz Prague Fashion Week, 2013
- Creative Business Cup, finalist, 2023
- DesignTalent Award Zlín, 2014
- Arts of Fashion, San Francisco, 2011
- Who’s the Next, 2011
David Šohaj Minařík
Awarded for MYCO, not for HILY. MYCO is the company David worked in until 2026; these awards have nothing to do with the HILY studio.
- Red Dot Design Award 2024, Product Design, Start-up category: MYCO SafePads / 4Pack (a product award). red-dot.org
- E.ON Energy Globe 2022, 1st place in the Czech Republic, and Energy Globe World Award 2022, honorary medal in the Earth category. energyglobe.info