Video: Silk dress made from "golden" spider webs. Art project by Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Madagascar is home to unique orb spiders (golden orb spiders)weaving their webs of golden threads. If you collect a large amount of this spider "gold", and make silk threads from it, then you can weave the most unique canvas of natural gold color. And this is exactly what the designers have been doing for the last three years. Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley … Their studio is located in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar. Taking on the help of about 80 local craftsmen, they weaved and sewed from "golden" spider silk a fashionable cape dress, today it is the largest product made of this unique natural material. Three years (according to some sources - five years), hundreds of thousands of orb-weaving spiders and many meters of priceless cobwebs were needed for the initiative group to carry out their creative project. The result exceeded all expectations.
I will note in advance: no one tortured or tortured the spiders, they were collected by specially trained people and placed in conditions close to natural. Since a spider can give a limited amount of golden web per season, they were released into the wild as soon as the season came to an end, accepting a new batch of orb webs. By the way, orb weaving females are extremely aggressive young ladies, though not poisonous. They can attack each other, or even eat their own kind, so from time to time the design assistants responsible for keeping the gold-bearing insects missed their charges, but such is natural selection, unpredictable and cruel.
After collecting the required amount of gold yarn, it was twisted into threads, following a specially developed technique, and then cloth was woven, also adhering to the recommendations that have survived from the 19th century, when dresses for members of the royal families, rulers of the Madagascar provinces, were woven from spider silk. Thanks to the thinnest and lightest silk thread created by spiders, the weight of the canvas was just over a kilogram. The fabric was embroidered with a symbolic spider-themed pattern, and the finished cape dress made from this precious fabric can be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Despite the fact that one square meter of fabric made of spider "gold" is estimated at 500 thousand dollars, the unique outfit cannot be sold.
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