I want it now

As a society I think we have rather got used to things happening quickly. We’ve all this automation, all this IT, all this production line manufacturing and with the rapid maturation of technologies like 3D printing this is only to get worse. Just about the only area we expect things to take more than days or weeks is construction and even then there are exceptions to that:

15 days? Strewth!

In the field of consumer goods none of us expects things to take long, we want design, testing and manufacture to happen overnight and the longest part of the process is the shipping from wherever we sourced the manufacturing capability to our sweaty hands. We want it now and we want it FAST!

Then every so often something comes along which directly challenges this, challenges our assumptions about speed, about the fungiblity of design, the applicability of automation and our expectations for delivery. Most of all it changes the way we think about value. We used to call this area art, before Duchamp turned our notions of the art upside down and moved it from an appreciation of effort and skill into one of appreciation of the message it conveys.

*How* Much?

This is a silk scarf/cloak thing. It's not dyed; the colour comes from its raw material, spider silk, in this case the Madagascan golden orb spider, which is about the size of your palm. This one piece of fabric, this one garment, took nearly ten years to make. To contextualise the effort, it takes about a thousand spiders to make one gramme of silk. The cape weighs over 2,300 grammes. To make matters even more mind bogglingly complex, the spiders aren’t harvested and killed during the process, they were captured from the wild, effectively “milked for silk” or “silked” and released again into the wild at the end of the day. Nearly one hundred people worked on this one garment for nearly a decade. There are nearly one thousand years of effort in this one garment.

And it’s a little bit bogging and mildly terrifying. Awesome in the truest sense of the word.

But despite what I think of the design, the garment is stunning beautiful, it’s one of the densest collections of human effort in the world. A unique and probably irreplaceable statement of the beauty and pointlessness of some types of human effort. A one off garment, too valuable to wear, woven from a rare and impractical thread, made in the most time consuming and complex way conceivable with no automation used or indeed currently possible. Pure effort for efforts sake, condensed into a golden cloak.

Go see it if you can and give thanks for a world where we can use automation for things like clothes and that you don't have to milk a million spiders to make your socks. The exbition is on at the V&A in London and you can find out more about it here: Madagascan Spider Silks