A Cape Spun From a Million Spiders

Madagascar’s golden orb-web spiders, several species in the genus Nephila, spin a dragline silk prized for a combination of strength and fineness that has fascinated textile makers for over a century. Unlike the domesticated silkworm, whose silk has been farmed at industrial scale for millennia, orb-web spiders cannot simply be caged together in numbers: kept in close quarters, they turn on each other, making anything resembling a silk farm impossible.

A silk finer and stronger than a silkworm’s, and no way to farm it at all.

Every attempt at producing spider silk textiles at any scale has therefore run into the same basic obstacle, one with no engineering solution: the silk exists only where the spiders themselves are, spun individually, one spider at a time, in the wild.

The method devised by British textile designer Simon Peers and American entrepreneur Nicholas Godley, working with teams of Malagasy spider collectors around Antananarivo, was necessarily manual. Collectors gathered wild female golden orb-web spiders from webs each morning, brought them to a workstation, and harnessed each one, unharmed, into a small silking rig that gently drew silk directly from her spinnerets before releasing her back into the wild the same day.

A skilled team working through this cycle could process roughly twenty-four spiders an hour, a rate that sounds almost brisk until set against the sheer quantity of thread a single textile requires. No spider was kept in captivity longer than necessary, and none was ever harmed in the process, a constraint that shaped every part of the project that followed.

No existing machine was built to handle silk drawn this way, so Peers designed and built his own, a wheel capable of combining dozens of individual spider silk strands into a single workable thread without breaking the delicate filaments. The resulting golden color required no dye at all: it is the silk’s own natural pigment, a warm metallic gold unique among commercially explored silks and the reason for the textile’s name.

Weaving proceeded on traditional Malagasy hand looms, the same basic technology used for generations to weave the island’s more familiar silk and cotton lamba cloths, adapted here to a thread unlike anything those looms had ever been asked to hold.

The finished textile, a four-metre embroidered cape and matching shawl completed in 2009 after roughly four years of work, drew on the silk of more than a million wild-caught, individually harnessed, and released female golden orb-web spiders, gathered by a rotating team of as many as eighty spider collectors and weavers across the highlands around Antananarivo.

It has since been exhibited at the American Museum of Natural History, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and other institutions worldwide, drawing crowds specifically to see a textile whose scale of production is, by design, almost impossible to repeat: it remains, by a wide margin, the largest piece of cloth made from natural spider silk ever produced, a record that stands less because no one has tried to beat it than because so few could.