It is hard for us at J&O Fabric to think of spiders as anything other than the creepy crawly things that give us goosebumps. However, upon finding out that more than a million Golden Orb spiders were used to create a 13-foot-long silk textile masterpiece, we had to give the spindly legged buggers their due.
To make the fabric, the spiders were collected each morning and put into ‘harnesses’ that linked them to specially made machines that would extract their silk. At the end of each session, the spiders were returned to the wild. This is a sharp contrast to the fate of silkworms whose pupa are killed in their cocoons to produce commonly used silk.
The textile was produced in Madagascar and is currently on display at the Art Institute of Chicago. According to historians, this type of fabric has not been made since 1900 for a celebration in Paris. However, the earliest record of these spiders being used to produce silk is 1709 when it was made by a Frenchman, Francois-Xavier Bon de Saint Hilaire, who fashioned gloves, stockings, and a full suit of clothes for King Louis XIV.
