What’s five times stronger than steel and three times tougher than Kevlar?
Your new favorite jacket, that’s what.
Patagonia has joined with Bay Area startup Bolt Threads to create its line of man-made spider silk jackets. Bolt’s fabric — called Engineered Silk — is produced using the protein fibers in spiderwebs. The company plans to start turning mass quantities of it into yarn this summer.
Other brands have also expressed interest in Bolt’s biotechnology breakthrough (the firm just locked down $50 million in financing from investors) and it seems likelier than not that you will be seeing these Peter Parker-approved jackets popping up in real life soon.
“We’re scaling up,” says Bolt chief marketing officer Sue Levin. “We’re going to be producing metric tons of material in the months ahead.”
That said, due to the product lead time the outdoor clothier requires, the earliest a Patagonia brand spider silk item will drop is 2018 (as yet there are no previews, either).
Those faded Spider-Man sheets — which we totally dig, by the way — will have to tide you over until then.
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