Ever since Klaus Mühlbauer inherited his parents’ hat factory in the fourth generation in 2001, the company has been experiencing a highly successful relaunch. Young-at-heart, colourful hat design in
top-quality workmanship suddenly cropped up next the classic forms
and colours and soon inspired the Viennese and meanwhile Brad Pitt, Madonna and Yoko Ono to wear Mühlbauer hats.

You wouldn’t normally put hats into the category of “product design”. But there is surely no doubt that hats and caps have something in common both in function and optics with lampshades. Tomas Kral is a Slovakian designer living in Lausanne. He has singled out these symbolic analogies of hat and lamp for his project with the old established hat factory. With abounding love of detail and equipped with the whole arsenal of processing methods and materials at Mühlbauer, Kral has developed his “Light Objects with Hat”.