In 1709, François Xavier Bon de Saint Hilaire, the president of the Court of Accounts, Aides, and Finances in Montpellier, France, presented the Sun King, Louis XIV, with a pair of silvery spider-silk stockings, woven from hundreds of painstakingly collected egg sacs. “The only difficulty now lies in procuring a sufficient quantity of Spiders Bags to make any considerable work of it,” Bon wrote in a letter to Britain’s Royal Society the following year. More than three centuries later, that not-so-inconsiderable difficulty has been overcome, and non-royals will, for the first time, have the opportunity to purchase their very own spider-silk apparel—specifically, a woven tie, dyed petrol blue and produced in a limited edition of fifty by Bolt Threads, a Bay Area-based biotechnology company.

Spiders, of course, have been producing silk for their own purposes for a very, very long time. According to Paul Hillyard, the author of “The Private Life of Spiders,” the earliest evidence of this comes from the three-hundred-and-eighty-million-year-old Devonian shale of New York State, where paleontologists found a spider’s fossilized rear end—a kind of arachnid showerhead with twenty spigots, through which the ancient spider would have pulled the silken filaments before combining them into a single thread. Since then, spider-kind has evolved seven different specialized silk glands. Male crab spiders make aciniform silk to tie up their lady friends before mating; female spiders weave silken tubuliform egg sacs; and trapdoor spiders produce special sticky silk globules with which to construct their heavy swing doors of layered earth and silk. The most versatile kind, though, is ampullate, or dragline, silk, which spiders use for abseiling and for framing their webs. In combination, these various silks can be used to create a seemingly infinite variety of forms: spider diving bells, spider sunshades, and even spider camouflage. (“A small, messy-looking patch of white silk” can appear surprisingly like a bird dropping, Hillyard observes.)

Human exploitation of spider silk has lagged behind the arachnid’s own ingenuity. The ancient Greeks reputedly used egg sacs to bandage wounds, and New Guinean fishermen are known to have woven the webs of orb spiders into nets. In apparel, though, the weaker threads of the silkworm have reigned supreme. Bon attributed this to humanity’s prejudice against “so dispicable an Insect,” but the more practical reason is that spiders have proved resistant to domestication. “Breeding Young Spiders in Rooms,” Bon noted, always ended the same way: they fought and ate each other. Which is a shame, because spider silk is something of a wonder material. Famously tough, it can be stronger than steel and more tear-resistant than Kevlar. Although a human can walk through a spider web with relative ease, that is because each strand is only three-thousandths of a millimetre in diameter. Scaled up to a full millimetre, it’s estimated that a spider web could catch a helicopter as effectively as it currently entraps flies. Spider silk is also extremely elastic and lightweight; some silks can stretch up to five times their length before breaking, and a strand long enough to encircle Earth would weigh just over a pound. The arachnids are excellent chemists, too, often imbuing their silks with water-wicking and antifungal properties.

Lured by this promise, a handful of entrepreneurial silk obsessives have attempted to follow in Bon’s footsteps over the years—and have, without fail, run up against the same problem of scale. The Civil War surgeon Burt Green Wilder, who is best remembered for using the term “neuron” in print before anyone else and for collecting pickled brains, reported extracting a hundred and fifty yards of golden thread from a large orb spider when he served on Folly Island, South Carolina, with the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, an African-American unit. Inspired, Wilder went on to devise a silking machine that resembled nothing so much as tiny medieval stocks: a hinged wooden board immobilized the spider with its head and legs on one side and its abdomen on the other, and a hand-cranked reel drew the silk out. It was a clever contraption, but Wilder later concluded that weaving a single spider-silk dress would require material from five thousand animals. More than a century later, the science hadn’t advanced much. In 1982, researchers at North Carolina State University were still publishing papers describing “an apparatus and technique for the forcible silking of spiders”—essentially an updated version of Wilder’s device, capable of accommodating dozens of spiders at a time.

Then came the genetics revolution of the nineties, and with it the possibility of endowing more docile species with the DNA to make spider silk. There would be no need for an orb-weaver dairy and ranch; genetically modified E. coli bacteria, yeast, tobacco plants, and even goats could do the job. (The remnants of a herd of Department of Defense-funded Biosteel goats currently reside at the University of Utah, after the biotech company that bred them to produce spider silk in their milk filed for bankruptcy.)

The problem was that, even with live spiders removed from the equation, the process remained, according to Dan Widmaier, Bolt’s C.E.O. and co-founder, “a real beast.” The company opted to make its silk using brewer’s yeast, fermented in stainless-steel tanks with water and sugar—a fairly straightforward setup. But the gene sequences that encode silk production consist almost entirely of just two of the four molecules that make up DNA, meaning that they are highly repetitive and easy to botch. Tinkering with those sequences to get the yeast to express different silk proteins, Widmaier said, was “painful”; he estimated that Bolt had gone through about four thousand formulations since it was founded, in 2009. “And then, once you’ve done the fermentation and the bugs have made all of this beautiful protein, then your next problem is how to get it out in a high-quality, pure stream to use as feedstock for your spinning,” he said. The yeast, in other words, had to be made to secrete the silk, so that Widmaier and his colleagues wouldn’t be obliged to scrape out each individual cell.

After the silk protein is separated from the sugary, yeasty water in Bolt’s fermentation tanks, it is purified into a powder. “It looks like something you’d buy at GNC to make a muscle shake,” Widmaier said. The powder is then mixed with a solvent until it takes on the viscosity of rubber cement: the resulting goop is called spin dope, and can be extruded through a die to create the fibre. (In nature, the spider relies on a push-and-pull mechanism to turn its spin dope into thread: a sudden drop in blood pressure forces the viscous silk proteins out of the showerhead-like nozzles in its abdomen, and the spider pulls these globules into strands using its legs and body weight.) “A lot of tedious, mundane things go wrong in spinning,” Widmaier said. Any number of minute tweaks to protein purity, viscosity, pH, and temperature can turn the spin dope into a sticky mess that forms beads rather than threads or jams up the die. Hence Widmaier’s pride at having produced fifty ties, each of which contains the equivalent of ninety kilometres of dragline spider silk.

Bolt Threads and the bankrupt company behind Utah’s Biosteel goats are not alone in pursuing genetically engineered spider silk. Last year, a Japanese firm called Spiber used E. coli to make a one-off parka for The North Face, and Adidas partnered with AMSilk, a German biomaterials company, to make spider-silk sneakers. But Bolt has won the race to make a commercial product, even if the numbers are so small that the company is choosing its buyers by lottery. For the moment, the ties are not stronger than steel, bulletproof, waterproof, or super stretchy—Widmaier recommends handling them as delicates—but, back in the lab, he said, the company is working with Patagonia on several more ambitious products. It is also trying to improve its environmental impact. The textile industry produces the most polluted wastewater of any sector, due largely to synthetic dyes, so Bolt is working on a strain of yeast that can excrete color as well as silk. And in the long term, Widmaier said, his goal is to wean the yeast off corn sugar, a crop that could be feeding humans instead, and onto cellulose-based sugars made from waste paper, sawdust, and sewage sludge. Already, bio-inspired fibres offer a significant environmental advantage over the industry’s last major leap forward—petrochemical-based fabrics such as nylon and spandex.

The company is moving not only beyond ties but also beyond silk. “In some ways, it’s a graduate-school holdover, calling it spider silk,” Widmaier said. “At the end of the day, we’re making protein-based fibres that have cross-sections and textures and properties such that they feel like almost anything you want—wool, nylon, or something entirely new.” In the future, biosilk could end up in products as diverse as military armor and pharmaceutical packaging, but Widmaier’s own dream is simple: a better, more durable, more comfortable long-sleeved sweater. “It’s not a space elevator, I know,” he said. “But it’s something I’m really excited about.”