Everyone knows you must sometimes suffer for your art, but chasing spiders around every morning for four years would test even the most dedicated among us.
And yet behind this golden cape is the remarkable story of a team in Madagascar who did just that. The flowing material is made from the silk of a million spiders.
Making the eleven foot by four foot textile involved going out into highlands every morning to capture female golden orb spiders, which would then be taken back and ‘silked’ by expert handlers before being released back into the wild.
The spiders – which aren’t afraid to bite - are abundant in Madagascar, but only produce their golden silk during rainy season, meaning work could only be carried out between October and June.
The Spider Silk in numbers:
4 metres long
8 years to create
80 people in the team responsible
96 strands per gossamer thread
23,000 spiders required to make 1 ounce of silk
1,000,000+ amount of spiders used to complete cape
The cape is the world’s only large piece of cloth made from natural spider silk, and is being displayed in Europe for the first time at London’s V&A Museum.
Talking about the aims of the project, co-designer Simon Peers told the Times: “I hope people will feel, a bit like visiting a cabinet of curiosities, that the world is full of wonders and that it inspires people.”
The spider silk cape had its debut at New York’s Natural History Museum in 2009, where it attracted record visitor numbers for a single exhibit.
Golden Spider Silk will be shown in the V&A’s Studio Gallery, 25 January – 5 June 2012