One of the things children of the late 21st century remark on, when looking back at people in the 2020s, is the clothes. What are they wearing, the kids ask. The issue isn’t so much the design and the peculiar fashion as the fabrics. Kids these days wear clothes made from silk – spider silk – from head to toe. They can’t imagine wearing garments that scuff and fray, that are heavy, ugly and vulnerable to dirt and acid, that exert a high environmental price to produce and that wear out in a few years. Hell, in the olden days, clothes weren’t even .
Spider silk began to replace other natural fibres, such as cotton and wool, and artificial fabrics like fossil fuel-derived nylon and elastane in the 2020s. Among all natural and synthetic materials, spider silk is the toughest known fibre, stronger, weight for weight, than high-tensile steel and Kevlar. Its properties outcompete traditional silk (from the cocoon of the silk moth Bombyx mori), but the reason why it never caught on is that spiders are territorial and produce only small amounts of silk. Spider farms were never viable.
It wasn’t that we learned to farm spiders – we instead figured out how use microbes to make the silk. These were grown in giant vats and produced a mixture of silk proteins, known as silk dope.
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One problem was all the complex ingredients that make up silk. Spider silk consists of very large proteins called spidroins, larger than bacteria are usually able to produce. Another problem was assembling the large proteins into a complex, ordered structure. Synthetic silk dope also typically required purification with harsh solvents before it was spun into fibre. Eventually, we learned how to make .
at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden led a team that managed to produce in the early 2020s. By then, a Japanese-Thai collaboration, , was already producing silk dope in bioreactors up to 1000 cubic metres in size. Other companies at the forefront of research and development included in the US, in Germany and in the Netherlands.
Microbial production of silk has a number of advantages over that of spiders. Unlike aggressive spiders, microbes can be grown at high density. Also unlike spiders, microbes will feed on pretty much anything. Bioreactor production lines were built that used specialised microbes to break down old textiles and clothes into glucose, which was then fed to the silk producers. Waste products from household, agricultural and industrial processes were broken down into glucose and glycerol, then fed into silk bioreactors.
Spider silk clothing became common, leading to unheard-of levels of comfort, protection and sustainability
As production scaled up, the sustainability benefits and economic savings led to spider silk replacing animal-derived fabrics, materials such as keratin, gelatine and elastin, and products like nylon. In the mid-2020s, the textile industry consumed over 60 million tonnes of plastic-based fibres per year, most of which ended up in landfill. The pivot to synthetic spider silk helped cut this to a manageable amount.
Synthetic silk can be easily augmented. In 2016, was made with a novel amino acid, which was bound to an antibiotic. This created a silk with antimicrobial properties. Many kinds of silk were ultimately created for medical and surgical purposes, such as tissue scaffolds, bone repair and strengthening, organ replacement and even .
Just as spiders produce several different types of silk (for , different synthetic spider silks were produced with different properties. Fashion design underwent its biggest revolution since the advent of nylon. Once a luxury product, silk clothing became commonplace, leading to unheard-of levels of comfort, protection, warmth, sustainability and style. For those who needed it, bulletproof silk patches could be incorporated into clothing.
There was another spin-off from the spider revolution. The must-have toy in the mid-21st century was a Spider-Man-inspired web slinger. worked out how spiders turn the liquid silk dope in their storage glands into high-tensile fibres and spin these in air. When synthetic dope was forced through a narrow nozzle, it created a thin scaffold fibre, which, when combined in an array, created superstrong adhesive webs.
Originally designed for military use, a version of the web slinger became commercially available. The number of young people flinging themselves off tall buildings for fun hadn’t been seen since the antics of Miles Morales and friends in the classic 2018 film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
Rowan Hooper is ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ‘s podcast editor and the author of How to Spend a Trillion Dollars: The 10 global problems we can actually fix. Follow him on Bluesky
@rowhoop.bsky.social
