The Cape Woven from a Million Spiders

In Madagascar’s highlands, where mist drifts over rice fields and tapia forests, there is a story spun not from silkworms but from spiders.

The golden orb-weaver (Trichonephila inaurata madagascariensis) stretches its webs between branches, threads glowing with a natural gilded sheen.

Stronger than steel by weight and more elastic than Kevlar, this silk has fascinated artisans and scientists for centuries.

Between 2004 and 2009, textile artist Simon Peers and entrepreneur Nicholas Godley undertook an extraordinary revival.

Each morning, teams collected thousands of spiders, gently drew out their threads using hand-powered devices, and then released them unharmed.

Over three years, silk from more than 1.2 million spiders was spun into a single shimmering masterpiece: a golden cape unlike anything else on Earth.

Spider silk weaving is an art of endurance. It takes thousands of spiders to produce just an ounce of usable thread. Unlike silkworms, spiders cannot be farmed; they are solitary and cannibalistic.

Every filament must be carefully extracted by hand, a process so laborious that almost no large textiles exist.