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Tesla talks about two unique and unusual textile materials: a potential solution to the industry's sustainability issues and an impractical but beautiful project. German company Anka Damascus created cow's milk-based fabric as a sustainable alternative, while Simon Peers and his team used 500,000 US Dollars and 1.2 million golden orb spiders to create two complete spider silk textiles. Spider silk is more flexible than worm silk but its fineness limits its applications. Both materials offer a way to reduce the negative impact of textiles on the environment.

DuPont revolutionised the textile industry with the invention of nylon in the 1930s, but the production of synthetic fibers has caused environmental issues related to the use of fossil fuels and chemical solvents. Tesla talks about two extraordinary and unexpected textile materials: a potential solution to the industry's sustainability issues and an impractical but beautiful project. The first is cow's milk-based fabric created by a German company, which uses basic lab equipment and supermarket ingredients. The second is microplastics, which are a consequence of the production process and are found in landfills and our water supply. Natural fibers and avoiding microplastics are important steps to reduce the negative impact of textiles on the environment.

Casein, a milk byproduct, is being used to create biodegradable and eco-friendly materials for fashion applications. Anka Damascus developed the process as a solution for her stepfather's chemotherapy. Simon Peers and his team then took 500,000 US Dollars and 1.2 million golden orb spiders to create two complete spider silk textiles. The process of harvesting silk from the spiders was first established in Madagascar in the late 1800s and King Louis XIV was presented with a spider silk garment. Spider silk is more flexible than worm silk, but its fineness limits its applications. This project required scaling up to create a textile with high thread count and thinness for a nicer finish.

Tesla dropped out of her textiles degree, but has been working in the fashion and textiles industry for a few years. Textiles are any kind of material made of natural or manufactured fibers or filaments. Tesla talks about two extraordinary and unexpected textile materials. The first is a potential solution to a commercial textile industry's sustainability issues. The second is an impractical and expensive project that took four years to produce a single garment. Synthetic fibers were invented in 1935 by Dupont, and involve taking petroleum-derived polymers and extruding them into a fine strand of fiber. These fibers are then turned into various products. A diagram is shown to illustrate the process.

DuPont revolutionised the textile industry with the invention of nylon in the 1930s. This process involves a spinnerette, solvent bath, stretching, washing, and finishing. The invention also paved the way for other polymer derived textile products such as polyester, acrylic, and Spandex. Natural synthetics such as rayon and viscose were also created using the same spinneret technology. However, the production of these materials involves a hefty process with many environmental issues. Every synthetic fiber ever produced is still in existence today and the production of these materials involves the use of fossil fuels and chemical solvents, leading to environmental runoff issues.

Viscose factories have been the subject of much debate, as their production processes involve the use of solvents which contribute to environmental runoff. Natural and synthetic fibers are biodegradable, but the chemical process of creating them is significant. Microplastics are one of the biggest consequences, and the landfill sites in developing countries have permanently altered the environment around them. Recycling polymer based fibers is not a widely done process, and even if it was, it is very costly and resource intensive.

Cow's milk is a sustainable textile option that has been used since the 1930s. Q Milk, a German company founded by Anka Damasca, has developed a process to extract milk protein fiber for textile use. This process uses basic laboratory equipment and supermarket ingredients, and took Anka 3,000 iterations of a recipe to perfect. While this is a partial solution to textile waste ending up in landfills, it is not the only answer. Wearing natural fibers and avoiding microplastics in our own closets and washing machines is also important, as microplastics are found in our water supply and in our bodies.

Casein, a milk byproduct, is used to create a biodegradable and environmentally friendly material for fashion applications. It has been scaled to divert millions of tons of milk waste annually in Germany and has hypoallergenic and antibacterial properties. It can replace synthetic fibers, such as viscose, and is used to create a lustrous finish on fabrics. Additionally, it has potential applications in hygiene products. Anka Damascus developed the process as a solution for her stepfather who was undergoing chemotherapy. It is a cost-effective solution to combat food waste and create sustainable materials.

Damasca has developed a technology that allows them to produce a polymer from milk which can be used to create food packaging, building materials, and other textiles. The process is still largely unknown, but the company claims that it is free of solvents and uses little water. The polymer is easy to blend with other fibers due to its thermal properties. It is unclear if the process has any nasty byproducts that the company is not disclosing. This technology is a recent development and is quite revolutionary for the textile industry.

Simon Peers was a textile export expert who was inspired by the French Jesuit missionary and arachnologist Jacob Paul Cambuy who built a machine to extract silk from spiders without harming them. Peers and his team of hundreds of skilled workers took four years, 500,000 US Dollars, and 1.2 million golden orb spiders to create two complete textiles of their kind. These textiles are the only two of their kind in existence today. Spider silk is an old concept, but it is difficult to create items with it. Cleaning and moisturizing it is necessary since it is skin.

In the late 1800s, a spider silk industry was established in Madagascar and exhibited a set of bed hangings at the Paris Exposition of 1898. The fabric has since been lost, but the process of harvesting the silk from the spiders was described in a news report. The spiders were restrained in a sort of stocks and the silk was wound onto a reel by a machine worked by hand. This process is still used today, although with a slightly different method of restraining the spiders. Tesla is believed to have seen the process in action.

The history of spider silk harvesting for textiles has been conducted overwhelmingly by French Colonials. King Louis XIV was presented with a spider silk garment that tore in every direction once it was worn. Simon Pierce and Nicholas Godley teamed up with Madagascan Weavers, embroiderers, and seamstresses to complete the project. Silkworms produce more silk than spiders, but the strand of worm silk is 0.07 millimeters in diameter, whereas spider silk can be as fine as 0.0002 millimeters. Spider silk is more flexible than worm silk, but its fineness limits its applications. The project required scaling up to create a textile. High thread count and thinness are different, but thinner silk is nicer.

Nicholas Godley and Simon Peers created the only complete piece of clothing made of 100% spider silk in existence. 70 people collected over a million golden orb spiders from Madagascar over four years, and workers carefully extracted 40-50 meters of silk filament from each arachnid. It took 24 individual filaments of spider silk to create one thread, and 96 threads to create a single strand of silk. The cape measures 335 centimeters by 121 centimeters and cost 500,000 US dollars to make. It was exhibited at the V&A museum upon completion, and there was a shawl to accompany the cape. The spiders had to be caught in small batches and released as they would immediately destroy each other in captivity. School girls brought up to 80 spiders a day in baskets. The cape is undyed and the color is the natural golden orb spider silk.

The exhibit featured a cape and shawl made from spider silk. It is unclear if the exhibit is still being shown to the public, however, the handle of the garments was said to be unique. It is believed that the garments will last a long time due to the properties of spider silk. It is also believed that the garments were carefully stored given their value. The garment was embroidered with golden spiders and is said to be quite lovely. The process of designing the garment involved cutting out the outside seam and other off-cuts.

The Artisans who spent years spinning, collecting and harvesting spider silk must have felt a deep sense of loss when they had to cut away parts of the fabric. Spider silk is extremely fine and antimicrobial, making it ideal for medical and surgical applications. In recent years, processes have been applied to silkworm silk to improve its tensile strength and flexibility, making the need to harvest spider silk for different capsules somewhat obsolete. Despite this, the spider silk project was an impressive achievement and a great example of avant-garde fashion.

The speaker discussed how spider silk and kombucha scoby have been adapted and experimented with for different purposes, such as environmental disaster solutions and consumer products. They encouraged people to look closely at the tags of clothing to understand the properties of different textiles and their environmental impact, so that they can make the most informed choice. There have been many experiments with textiles, but some have not been successful due to the nature of the material and the technology available.

well this is Tesla she knows more about textiles than I know about mathematics so please enjoy good advertisement thank you so much for having me Maddie uni I'm really excited to do this talk today I love to talk about textiles and um full disclosure I did drop out of my textiles degree so um I may not be fully qualified but I did work in the fashion and textiles industry for the last few years so I think that makes up for it and so when you think of textiles generally the first image that comes to mind is Fabric in some form it could be curtains or bedspreads or the clothing that you're wearing if we're being specific though textiles are any kind of material which is made of fibers thin threads or filaments that are natural or manufactured or a combination of both it's an incredibly broad category which surrounds us in our daily life and in a vast number of forms and materials many of these materials you will likely already know and they can be categorized into these main types so I've just got a little table here I won't go through all of them just so you can have a look at the sort of um variety there is the main categories are protein fibers which is like animals hair and wool and cellulose types of plants really um synthetic which is a range of different polymers and natural synthetic which sounds like uh it doesn't make sense but I'll explain that in the next section there are a few other specialized categories which include metal and asbestos but that's for another time today I'm going to talk about two examples of textile materials which are quite extraordinary and also unexpected the first example is a potential solution to one of the commercial textile Industries biggest sustainability issues and the other is a project which is unbelievably impractical prohibitively expensive and took four years to produce a single garment sorry if you come along that sounds like more our style damn slow expensive route yeah so um commercial textiles biggest Innovation was the invention of synthetic fiber this took place in 1935 when Dupont a business in the United States created nylon which is the fiber responsible for Hosiery parachutes and a thousand things in between this process involved taking petroleum-derived polymers and extruding them into an extremely fine strand of fiber which were then turned into various other products at the bottom of the slide here I've got a diagram which I felt um shows this process in its entirety best and the poem is a kind of liquid at

first they're put through um a spinnerette in like a solvent bath and then there's a process of uh stretching and washing and finishing which is usually like heat um to give it a sort of um either a smooth and a lustrous finish or something rougher and more robust depending on what application it's going to take um this was revolutionary for the industry as it was cheap to produce and essentially an instant fiber you didn't need a sheep or a crop to get what you needed it also spelled environmental disaster but the people of the late 30s and early 40s were less concerned with conservation and more with an immediate source of material for war-related applications um Dupont quickly pivoted to creating parachutes um during the war rather than women's stockings the introduction of other polymer derived textile products such as polyester acrylic Spandex and many others which utilize the same spinneret technology were patented in the Years following so we also um around the same time we were able to use this technology to create natural synthetics and so to describe these um it's sort of similar to creating paper from trees and we essentially popped down a raw cellulose material like bamboo or rayon or viscose rayon and viscose are like kind of wood pulp or wood chip products um and once they're sort of liquefied or pulped they're able to be extruded in a very similar fashion so yeah while these are like uh marketed As Natural materials and biodegradable and they are biodegradable there's actually a quite a hefty process involved in making them that has like quite a few um environmental issues associated um so yeah that's a pretty pretty big deal for textiles having this like technology and we've been able to apply it and adapt it for like so many different things it's quite extraordinary um the only problem with it is that every single synthetic fiber we have ever produced is still in existence today so um we are 88 years on from DuPont's initial nylon invention and whether these fibers still exist as an original product that is still being used or they've been recirculated as a recycled product or they are simply sitting in landfill and a lot of them are in addition to this the polymer materials themselves a derived from fossil fuels and the manufacturing process as you've just seen involves a lot of chemical solvents which contribute to environmental runoff issues there's a really great program I can recommend by ABC in Australia there are four corners program did an episode

on viscose factories I think they focus on ones in India but it was quite um Sensational at the time when they put it out and it had a really good Deep dive into some of the consequences of producing these Fabrics um yeah yeah so the polymer materials themselves that derived from fossil fuels manufacturing process involves a lot of solvents which contribute to environmental runoff we have perfected a range of natural synthetic fibers which I just went over and while their end product is biodegradable the chemical process of creating them is significant so yeah that's pretty not good are there any questions so far about yeah I mean obviously the chemical runoff part is not good but uh okay the Earth is very big you can dig very big holes uh why do I care if there's a big pile of synthetic fibers somewhere underground I mean if it's leaking into the environment through microplastics I guess I care but yeah so microplastics is probably one of the biggest um biggest consequences um is part of the argument that it's I mean I guess if the source is a non-renewable resource like uh fossil fuel then it's I guess it just seems kind of pointless to make it and then bury it uh by the thousands of tons hmm do you care less because the landfill isn't in your backyard perhaps is it um like I don't I haven't done the research on like what the size of the landfill is I know it's like extremely significant in developing countries a lot of countries like um Australia and America um and in Europe they tend to ship their textile waste off to places like India and parts of Asia yeah um and so I know that like for example some of the landfill sites um in these developing countries are I have like permanently altered the state of the environment around them um and I think uh whether it's happening in our backyard or whether it's happening somewhere else it's probably not a good thing I guess like the fact is is that these landfills aren't really going anywhere like these textiles are likely unable to be recycled um they don't meet the criteria because recycling um sorry I didn't actually read this slide recycling polymer based fibers is um not really something that has been done a lot we're seeing a little bit more recently because the consumer demand is there for it people want to wear things that are recycled because it sort of makes them feel a bit better but the reality of recycling textiles whether it's natural or synthetic is that it's extremely costly and resource intensive

um and in the grand scheme of things it only prevents like a very small amount of the actual textile waste from ending up in the landfill um so really like moving forward as consumers and like as like textile producers we need to sort of find ways to steer away from what we've got there's not really a way to like change what's already there um I guess right now um yeah the microplastic thing is like pretty crazy whether it's in landfill and they're like sort of uh affecting the environment in landfill is one thing but even just having them in our own closets and washing them in our like washing machines at home um that is all the time creating more microplastics in the water supply and we are finding more and more people who have microplastics in their bodies and that could be from ingestion and that could even be just from wearing um clothes I I don't like know that all the research on it but it's like quite concerning but it's also completely unavoidable and so it can be quite a depressing topic because you think oh this is terrible what can we do and it's like ah even if you wore all natural fibers for the rest of your days um I don't know what uh what sort of impact it's going to have other than on your like sort of uh conscience I suppose so yeah a little bit depresso um so the answer for a partial answer is cows or more specifically cow's milk which I was a little bit clickbaity and I left it off the initial slide table um cow's milk is rich in protein and produces a really soft and versatile fiber when it's processed um the cow's milk should have been on the table because we have been able to extract milk protein fiber for textile use since the 1930s um this is not a New Concept but the process used a very very similar uh to Natural synthetic textiles and it had the same sort of drawbacks with like intensive resources and solvents and stuff like that um what is new and exciting is that there's a German company um called Q milk that was founded by Anka damasca and she is a microbiologist and fashion designer so in 2014 she was researching chemically untreated clothing and she came across this concept was really like enamored with it probably because she's German they love milk you know um we just moved to the Netherlands and they just go crazy for dairy here and Nebraska used about 200 Euros of Supermarket ingredients and basic laboratory equipment so she had a lab but this started in her kitchen essentially um and she used approximately 3 000 iterations of a recipe to extract milk

casein without solvents and it was successful so because this is still a very recent development in the scheme of things the actual process is still an industry secret but it has been scaled to divert you know millions of tons of milk waste annually in Germany alone and it has really exciting potential to replace a lot of synthetic and natural synthetic materials in fashion applications and more um so that the milk that they're using for this is not edible it's like um basically not not fit for food consumption um so it's a byproduct and it's usually disposed of at a very high cost for Dairy Producers so this is a solution for more than just the textiles industry it's also helping to like combat food waste um in that regard so um there are some pretty cool properties with milk fiber it can be similar to a lot of natural fibers um it's really good for moisture wicking it's very lustrous so usually um to get a sort of lustrous finish on Fabrics we would blend in a lot of uh natural synthetics like viscose or like rayon um and it's amazing to have an alternative to those fibers which um could create a fully environmentally friendly and biodegradable material so um say like blending with cotton like I've got in the slide over here am I moving I'm in the wrong thing so what does lustrous mean for a material just shiny like Silk or yeah it's like a shiny silky finish uh cotton on its own uh is not generally that sort of a handle is uh how we describe the feel of a fabric so uh cotton on its own doesn't generally have a sort of lustrous handle um but if we blend it with something like viscose we can get a kind of smooth uh shiny finish um and so instead of using viscose if we can use something like milk um that that fabric and that end result has a has a much kind of footprint um in the scheme of things so uh yeah blending natural fibers with synthetics and natural synthetics is done to achieve certain textures and finishes um there's also some pretty cool properties with milk fiber that make it hypoallergenic and antibacterial when Anka Damascus was actually researching this she was doing it for her stepfather who was going through chemotherapy at the time um and so we've been able to understand that there are some like very cool um properties of the fabric that are antibacterial and because of this and because this is essentially like a protein or a polymer Q milk has a lot more applications than simply just textiles um so yeah they have advertised it uh as being applicable to hygiene products uh

food packaging and even building materials um damasca has a goal to build a house out of Q milk because essentially if it's a polymer you can sort of create anything with it in the forest which is pretty cool yeah yeah yeah um I I haven't been able to find a lot online about that I didn't go too deep into it but they have a very comprehensive website um and there's been a lot of different articles written by it was quite Sensational um this technology when it was created so yeah thanks cows I'm curious and thanks Uncle I mean one can produce cowl the protein in milk without cows uh fermentation would do that so I guess presumably you could then just plug that in and produce this material without the cows that's right so the the um with the process still being kind of uh Under Wraps it's kind of Untold yet what sort of adaptations could be made to it to sort of be used for any because essentially any sort of protein-rich uh thing has the potential to to be like adapted to fit with this um I'm really interested to know like what other like milks might produce what sort of textiles and like uh what you know any other type of um thing I think it's a I think it's a heat like a thermo sort of process I think they powder the milk and then they sort of do something to extrude it but I haven't been able to find out um fully it's a little bit Secret Squirrel still um but it's pretty cool it's really really hot so um so new so recently um until now a lot of things have been just kind of like uh using the same existing technology and just sort of trying new putting new things through the same process rather than altering the process altogether it's funny that you think one of the oh no I was gonna say do you think one of the secrets could be like a nasty byproduct that they don't want to admit I think so they've been like I I have approached this uh with many grains of salt because I am pretty aware of like the marketing and the green washing that kind of takes place especially in the textile industry because inherently it's quite an unfriendly industry like environmentally but um they've made some pretty bold claims they have made the claim that there is zero solvent involved like chemical processing uh and they've made the claim that there is next to no water as well um they I've seen some warnings with it about washing and that it's also really easy to blend with other fibers due to its like thermal properties and so I think that their claims are true um maybe the product isn't as like

versatile as they might want it to be just yet like I don't know if you can like accidentally melt it at a certain temperature you can't blend it with certain things yet um but it is like a commercially available like this fabric you can buy it in a shop um today and um I'm sure I've seen like food packaging being used as well so I don't think there's any like nasty Secrets um I'll be kind of surprised at this point if something comes up so yeah um did you have a question then I'm just gonna remark that it seemed really weird to make uh material from milk but then of course it's also very bizarre to make material from worms and that seems normal so yeah we'll get into that because I think like a lot of people um tend to when they think of silk like I think it's one of those things that you just try to forget about that they um there are thousands of insects being killed to like create your um so when I worked in um furniture sales I used to get a lot of people sort of forgetting that leather couches were made from like this picture I'd like to talk about how you know you've got to cleanse it and you've got to moisturize it because it is skin and that would like really weird some people laugh um so yeah that's a good segue into our next example so I'm going to go over to this slide um I put the properties for silkworms up on this board just because I think that's what is most familiar to the average person and uh we're gonna talk mostly about spider silk um which people may not be as familiar with or they might think it's like similar to worms so just here to dispel any uh misconceptions so the second textile uh that we're going to talk about today isn't A New Concept we have been attempting to create items with it as early as the 17th century but there are only two complete textiles of their kind in existence today these two textiles took almost four years of continuous work a team of hundreds of skilled workers 500 000 US Dollars and 1.2 million golden orb spiders so this project begins with Simon peers he was a textile export expert who lives and works in Madagascar so in 2005 um Piers was inspired by the French Jesuit missionary and arachnologist Jacob Paul camberway he worked with spiders in Madagascar during the 1880s and the 1890s pardon me uh cambuy built a small hand-driven machine to extract silk from up to 24 spiders at once without harming them so father convaway also had a partner in designing his machine um M nougie or nog I'm not very good with the French today they got quite

together they got quite a spider silk industry going in Madagascar and even exhibited a complete set of bed hangings at the Paris exposition of 1898. why why why are they making anything with spiders uh I think that that actually is like the theme of this topic is not like can you but should you it's I think it was seen as like obviously quite uh rare and exotic and sure uh people just get fixated I think it was one of those things where it was like wow I could do this so like I'm going to um if you come along don't fall into the portal for Tasmania on to the squad uh insane this is so uh the fabric that they created for the exposition was has been lost you said that didn't harm the spider right that doesn't look no no uh I'm gonna read you an excerpt from the uh Exposition where they showed their bed hangings we don't have any details on how big the bed hangings were what sort of material it was that they were able to create it's all very like he is a uh he's an extract from a news report at the time sort of thing I'm going to begin the quote it should be said that the female halabe spider allows herself to be relieved of her silken store with exemplary decility and in this and this in spite of the fact that she is distinguished for her ferocity her usual treatment of the males who pay her court is to eat them and she feasts without compunction on members of her own sex weaker than herself the apparatus consists of a sort of stocks arranged to pin down on their backs a dozen spiders these spiders accept this imprisonment with resignation and lie perfectly quiet while the silken thread issuing from their bodies is rapidly wound onto a reel by means of a cleverly devised machine worked by hand end quote so yeah they pretty much put the spider in stocks and um spin the silk off of them this way so the machine that they ultimately were using was sort of like this but with the ability to harvest silk from 24 spiders so I I really um you can't find a diagram for that one in the public domain um but you can just imagine how like crazy um this is um yeah I would not have believed that well maybe I still don't believe it but no it's interesting though because um this this is something they came up with is actually the standard and sort of a version of this is used by scientists today um I don't think they're like mini stocks are involved I think they sort of restrain them slightly differently um but it's pretty much yeah uh they nailed it I'm pretty sure I saw Tesla

make this image with Dolly that's right well when she said when she said there wasn't a picture of it being done to 24 spiders at once that was my I wrote down yeah yeah um okay so it's interesting because the history of spider silk harvesting for textiles has been conducted overwhelmingly by French Colonials who had an obsession with producing it as an alternative to Silk uh to the silk of the bombix moth larvae which produced the material we know and use today there is an amusing story of King Louis XIV being presented with a spider silk garment which tore in every direction once it was being worn that humiliated the king I'm not sure what consequences befell the spiders or The Artisans who produced it thankfully Simon Pierce teamed up with a fashion expert Nicholas Godley and dozens of Highly skilled madagascan Weavers embroiderers and seamstresses to complete the project so if we want to run back quickly to this slide um it sort of explains a little bit about um the difference between silk and spiders so they're with a silkworm you get a lot more silk um out of the insect than you do from a spider at a time um you only get one lot of silk out of a worm because once they produce their cocoon they're sort of instantly steamed and killed um because you do not want the silk strand which is one continuous strand that creates the Cocoon to be broken because once the worm has finished um cooking in the Cocoon I don't know the word for it they chew their way out which obviously breaks their continuous strand around them um I sort of am hesitant to say that you get more silk from worms than spiders all together though because they are able to uh harvest the spiders like more than once so I suppose over a period of time you probably get more silk overall from a spider um but the caveat to that is that uh the strand of worm silk is 0.07 millimeters in diameter approximately but for a spider it can be as fine as 0.0002 millimeters so it's quite an extreme difference in like the size of the silk um as well we often hear things about how spider silk is like so much and um a lot more flexible and that is true um but with the fineness of it it sort of limits the applications a little bit more you have to scale up any kind of project s to create a textile like massively and I'll describe that in this project soon and we're getting nicer when the silk is thinner like a like high thread count or something thinner and high thread count are different but um I don't know how to describe how thin

this would be I can't picture it because I've seen very very fine silk like you could read a newspaper through it and so I knowing the difference with spiders I just can't actually imagine whether it would just be transparent I'll I'll come back to this um because I have a pretty good um way to describe it um if you come to this um so to make a textile of any significant size the silk experts had to drastically scale up their project so 70 people uh set out every single day over four years and collected over a million golden orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar while another dozen workers carefully extracted about 40 to 50 meters of silk filament from each of the arachnids using replicas of camboy's harvesting device um they uh Nicholas Godley and um uh Simon peers have described the difficulty they had in finding Artisans who were willing to work with Fires at all um which I thought was pretty funny um once they've been harvested of their silk they were released back into a while where Godly said that it takes them about a week to regenerate their silk so they say we can go back and re-silk the same spiders um it's like the gift that never stops giving and quote the main reason that the spiders need to be caught and harvested in small batches at a time is because they will immediately destroy each other if kept in captivity together so it was a very constant process of going out and catching spiders I think they had school girls bringing up to like 80 spiders at a time in baskets um every day so it's uh quite like crazy um the final results of this undertaking is this Exquisite hand woven and hand embroidered Cape to give you an idea of how the spider silk was spun into a fabric understand that it takes 24 individual filaments of spider silk to create one thread and 96 threads need to be applied together to create a single strand of silk which can be woven or embroidered with so it's quite an incredible scale um and you can just see like how it's taken so long um to create the the fiber color that we can actually do anything with yeah so that's actually undyed that's the color of the golden orb spider silk turn this baby and um the cape measures 335 centimeters by 121 centimeters and it cost piers and godly approximately 500 000 US dollars of their own money so it was exhibited at the v a museum upon completion and it is the only complete piece made of 100 spider silk in existence today I think there was a shawl that went with this um I haven't been able to find a photo of

it um so they made a cape and a shawl um for their exhibit um and I'm not sure I couldn't find uh if this is still being exhibited anywhere in the world today or perhaps it's just in their like our own private collection now um but it's quite amazing in a video they discussed that it's like nothing they've ever felt before and it's like um you know you can just feel um the handle of it is so unique and Etc um I don't know I would love to be able to touch it but I also think that if I had spent 500 000 of my own money I would like want to believe that it was incredible as well every every billionaire should have one but what's what yeah what determines where the textiles actually last over time I mean who's to say this doesn't fall apart in two years how would you know ahead of time um I think like a pretty good indicator is that like Silk garments don't tend to fall apart if they're stored correctly like we have um we have garments from like Chinese dynasties that you would never have thought would like remain um I don't know if they were like store like obviously they've installed carefully um over time I think like it's it's a pretty good indicator that we understand the properties of spider silk quite thoroughly um when they're not like spun into a textile and the good thing is um spinning fibers um so I talked about um putting 24 filaments of spider silk into a thread 96 threads into a strand that only strengthens a fiber as well so that I have no doubt this will probably last for a very very long time and I'm I have no doubt that it will probably be stored carefully as well given the value of it um so yeah maybe it will pop up again someday I would love to see it um but yeah it's pretty wild pretty crazy it is a very like wow why would you do this and I'd love to know like the process behind like designing this garment and like how did they decide to do this with that of all things and you know not a dress or a skirt it's like quite interesting the if you can go online and look at other photos of it it's actually been embroidered with golden old spiders Covenant spiders it's very decorative um it's quite um it's quite lovely so yeah um imagine you'd be like to just like cut random bits off like you would if you're like designing any other garment like you kind of wanted yeah yeah in the video where they're making it there's a a sort of progress shot where they're sort of cutting out the outside seam here to line it and just seeing any kind of off-cut sort of

like hurts my heart you must imagine how The Artisans would feel after spinning and collecting and harvesting for years and years and then having to like cut away some part of the fabric um it yeah if I ever have like an expensive fabric that I'm making something with it's very hard to cut into it and so I have no idea how these people must have felt uh with with something like this is it usually made in like a can you make it in a perfect rectangle or is it kind of more rough edges like or a weird shape um if you're this was woven by hand and um the edges of a fabric are called salvages usually the Salvage uh has a sort of slightly warped or wobbly or different weave on the ends so that it um doesn't fall apart and so you'd have to at least cut the selvages off um at the very least can you recycle that I don't know I don't know a lot about the spider silk recycling process unfortunately there's not a lot on that this is the only thing that's a growth industry I think we're yeah I think there's there are some like um so like the two main properties which can continue to set spider silk apart from silkworm silk is that it's extremely fine and that it's also antimicrobial so uh spider silk is ideal for medical and surgical applications because it's very fine and because um it like rejects any sort of bacterial growth um so like there is a lot of research being done on it it's just not like as frivolous as this um I think we'll see it uh in a few new applications the other thing is that um in recent years there are a pretty cool number of processes which they've been able to apply to silkworm silk which improve its tensile strength and its flexibility to be even greater than spider silk so we've been able to replicate some of the properties of spider silk on um so it kind of makes the need to harvest spider silk for different capsules a bit obsolete really which is probably a good thing it was never it was never not obsolete right clearly the reason to do this was somehow like I don't know uh not motivated by its end properties but rather by no maybe they just fell in love like spiders silk or something yeah like it is a very like um like I'm glad that uh Godly and peers like achieved their Vision um I'm really glad that I'm glad that this exists just as like a textile Enthusiast I think it's like quite amazing but it does beg the question why and I defend a lot of like avant-garde fashion and I defend a lot of different projects uh just as art um and this has been so much fun to

research and sort of learn about but it is just like why on Earth would you do for this audience yeah this this desire doesn't need much motivation of course this spider okay yeah every mathematician spends their life producing their own spiders yeah I like you know like this isn't on exhibition anywhere and I do have to wonder like found and whether it's with someone that does wear it just around the house like in there like Mansion or something that's kind of fun if you think about oh so yeah I hope that this talk has given you like a really small glimpse into some of the interesting ways that we've adapted and experimented with materials for different purposes one as an answer to an ongoing environmental disaster and one is a kind of homage to centuries of attempts to spin spider silk as a consumer it can be really empowering to understand the properties of different textiles and their environmental impact and because that allows you to make the most informed choice on a product and it also helps you to distinguish what is best for a purpose I really encourage anyone to look closely at the tags of your clothing sometime generally a composition tag will be on the left hand seam of a garment or a t-shirt or your pants um so did you know what they were made of or do you know what will become of it at the end of its life cycle uh what will you purchase to replace it these are all questions which we can ask ourselves to improve our ecological footprint and to also live more purposefully um so yeah I've also um got on this board a few other experimentation with textile materials that I I've just come across um there's a few using like if you if you know kombucha um there's like a scoby a little fermented sort of Puck of bacteria that sits in the liquid my mother makes heaps and heaps of Kombucha there's bottles and bottles of it yeah for me right now yeah I'm sure she has a lot of scobies so tell her that um there is some textile options for them uh that has been really cool I don't think they've been able to make them waterproof yet they've been a lot of garments being made but they can't be wet or worn for very long because the moisture from your body so that's kind of why I like to do to the two examples that I picked today uh have been like very successful there are a lot of um cool experiments that have been done with textiles which haven't really gotten so far just yet um just due to the nature of the material and the technology that we've been able to sort of harness with them