Project Runway: Spider Edition

Golden orbweaver spiders from Madagascar secrete the only spider silk that is gold in color, not white. And now a five-year project to create a cape is finished and on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. This is the first spider silk textile made since the late 19th Century.

Clothing designer Nicholas Godley designed the garment. He says, “The color is just incredible. It’s incredibly strong, incredibly soft, incredibly sticky.” But his creation goes beyond being just a fashion experiment. He adds, “In the scientific and medical world at least spider silk is many ways the Holy Grail — in many ways it’s one of the most incredible materials.”

1.2 million spiders made the golden silk thread that built the gold brocaded cape.

Textile expert Simon Peers explains the process, starting with the spiders. He says, “You can’t keep spiders together because they are cannibals — they eat each other.”

To bypass that obstacle the garment team had 80 spider wranglers go out every morning and collect spiders. They brought them back to the spidery where they silk is extracted. The spiders are not harmed during the process. Once they donate their silk they are let loose in the afternoon.

Once the spiders have finished their work, four strands of silk are twisted together to make an ultra-strong and extremely flexible golden thread for a team of humans to sew into fabric. This particular spider silk stretches another forty percent of its resting length, which makes it very difficult to work with as a textile.

Peers is a British expatriate who moved to Madagascar over 20 years ago where he established a business to promote and explore the island nation’s heritage of weaving.

According to Wired.com in 2009,

Peers conceived the idea of weaving spider silk after learning about the French missionary Jacob Paul Camboué, who worked with spiders in Madagascar during the 1880s and 1890s. Camboué built a small, hand-driven machine to extract silk from up to 24 spiders at once, without harming them.

Science News tells a slightly different tale.

At some point, Peers shared what he had learned with a friend who was doing academic research on Madagascar’s textiles. “And she enthused about this whole idea of spider silk,” Peers recalls. “In fact, she pursued it a little further than I did,” turning up details of the original machine that was used to “silk” spiders for that World’s Fair fabric. While in France, she had one small element of the silker reproduced and made Peers a present of the mechanical piece.

It then sat on a shelf in his office for years. Many, many years.

At the time the Godley and Peers project had made a large piece of fabric but had not cut the garment yet into a cape yet.

Molecular biologist Randy Lewis is also stuck on spider silk and is always looking for new practical applications for the material in the real world. With a tensile strength greater than steel and even kevlar (used in bullet-proof vests) spider silk is an ultralight weight material that could stop a speeding bullet.

Lewis lives in Wyoming and decided to combine his knowledge of animal husbandry with cutting-edge genetics. In the process he made transgenic goats that produced spider silk in their milk. That’s one way to overcome the spider labor problem faced by Godley and Peers.

Peers estimates that the spider silk project took hundreds of thousands of hours when you factor in the work of the spiders.

Excerpt from NOVA’s Making Stuff show about spider silk, featuring Simon Peers and Randy Lewis.