All posts by Marion

Travel

Radical Departures – Bentley Magazine

Radical Departures

Forget the cliches- it’s time to rediscover Australia

by Marion Hume

My theme is Australia. You may consider this southern continent the most radical departure from everyday experience- or equally, the least. It is, of course, a long way from just about everywhere and spending your entire weekend traveling may be a strange notion (except those who commute from London to Sydney.) Yet it is also the faraway destination that you might think holds little to surprise. We know all about Bondi Beach and finding Nemo on The Great Barrier Reef and that vast red rock in teh centre correctly called Uluru, don’t we?

Yet Australia is travel’s big surprise for 2012 in terms of culture, food and travel experiences which which have zero to do with the old ‘flop and drop’ backpackers of old. Let’s consider food first. We know Australia is the land of fusion, the nation that exports hard-working chefs – ask to meet the creator of your dinner anywhere from Bruges to Beijing and chances are, the bloke who emerges from the kitchen has a lazy gin and an Aussie greeting. But what is so buzzy is the Sydney food scene. Melbourne and Adelaide have long been vibrant food centers, this in no small part sue to sophisticated emigres from Italy and Greece. But in Sydney, the equation used to be ‘great view + lackluster food + too chilly air con and bad service = huge bill’. Now, one of the city’s best restaurants is in a basement.

But lets us focus first on the entrepreneur and food god that is Maurice Terzini, who helms several restaurants with peerless views and great food. Terzini, with partners Robert Marchetti and Kimme Shaw, has changed Sydney. Icebergs Dining Room and Bar, with glittering views across the ocean at Bondi Beach, is one of the few restaurants  on earth where it is a requirement, rather than a pose, to eat lunch in dark glasses. Then came North Bondi Italian Food, where the queue for tables starts at 6pm (no reservations). Now, in Neild Avenue, a road drivers used to cut through without stopping, comes the latest arrival, called- with brevity-Neild Avenue and housed in a former factory. What’s to love? The ambience, and the  gorgeous Sydney women in high heels and tiny dresses? Yet, but thats common in this snazzy town. The difference is the food, which here features Ottoman cuisine as flavorsome as in those run-down shacks by the Bosporus. We’re talking lamb pistachio kebabs with cracked wheat and hung yogurt, velvety hummus, buffalo halumi with lemon, mint and shallot salad. Diners even get excited about cauliflower.

Sydney is not only Terzini’s town of course. Neil Perry (who creates the onboard catering for Qantas, surely the only long haul airline where you actually look forward to dinner) is the reigning monarch of Rockpool and its many spin-offs. His latest is the Spice Temple, where the food is fiery with the flavours of Sichuan, Yunnan and Xinjiang This is the joint in the basement so dinners enjoying a combination of fine local produce and authentic regional Chinese cuisine have nothing to divert them from what is on their plates. Then there are the little joints, like Vientiane, an organic Laotian restaurant combined with an art gallery which is carving out a name for “wellness” food that manages to be delicious and can be washed down with organic wine in a cute little boite hung with cutting-edge art. (Last time I was there, someone dropped AU$60 for dinner and AU$6,000 for a sculpture. Which was a shame because they had the latter packed to go while I was eating and I’d been enjoying the sight of it.)

Even home cooking has changed. The land of the “sausage sizzle ” has moved on from the humble ‘snag’ (which translates as ‘sausage’ from the local argo, ‘strine’). Fashionable in Sydney now? Competitive butchery with butchers shops as done up as the lobbies of small luxury hotels. Victor Churchill, in the Sydney suburb of Woollahra has a Himalayan salt-brick wall to help age the beef. In my grandmother’s day, shopping for supper meant asking if there were any chops. Now, customers can be heard requesting 36-month-old grass-fed meat, dry-aged for 30 days, for mince for burgers.

While butchers shops look like shiny hotel lobbies, the best hotels in Australia combine low key charm, the least possible impact on the environment and very good local wine. Southern Ocean Lodge is on Kangaroo Island, a short hop from Adelaide, South Australia. Hotelier James Baillie is a visionary, although you’d need at least 20:20 vision to even spot the lodge from afar as it disappears into the hillside . But there ‘s no swimming here.  Although the ocean spray comes right through your window, out there is the No.1 breeding ground for the Great White Shark.

James Baillie has made it tricky for me to choose my No.1 hotel on earth because he helms my equal two. Lord Howe Island was one of the last places on earth to be inhabited (and only descendants of the original handful of families can build houses there today). (It was first sighted at the end of the 19th century when a freighter was blown off course). As a result, the wildlife has no fear. Clap your hands and birds come down from the sky to see what is going on. But I’m no David Attenborough. I want supreme yet low-key comfort with my ornithology Capella Lodge is perfect.

The greatest travel commentator of them all, Alan Wicker, used to say he liked his paradises slightly spoilt, which to me means no one for miles, but wine and a proper loo. Kuri Bay is way up in the Kimberley, on the remotest shore of one of the most isolated regions, known up to now only to pearl divers. In partnership with Paspaley Pearls, Wild Bush Luxury – helmed by CHarles Carlow – has transformed Australia’s oldest pearl farm into a five room homestead, which is not luxurious in the traditional sense yet guests enjoy rare local delicacies such as pearl meat. The property is only accessible by helicopter or sea plane – a spectacular, one hour and 45-minute air safari from Broome, itself a tiny tin-roofed town three hours flight north of Perth, in turn the most isolated city in the world. Just don;t pack the IPad.

Travel alone to Three Hummock Island, off the northwest coast of Tasmania and you will be increasing the resident population by 50%. There are two residents at the place on our planet which enjoys the purest air quality. THis isle is an ark, where you can see all manner of rare marsupials. This is new luxury, which is to say managers John and Beverly O’Brien do everything possible to ensure a lovely stay. Just don’t expect a lock on the loo. Or indeed, a closed door.

Come to Australia for the culture? In which other country might you do a three city hop where the most radical contemporary art- some of it so transgressive it is rarely exhibited elsewhere – will knock your socks off? Let’s start with Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, reopening after an AU$53 million rebuild this spring to reveal galleries of a scale that would make London’s Tate Modern and Madrid’s Museo del Prado jealous. And they are already jealous, one presumes, of a location right across the harbour from the Opera House, itself the ultimate site-specific work of art.

The Queensland Gallery of Modern Art is up in steamy Brisbane where the mercury rises. Brisbane was a country town that has become a city (Chanel has opened a store there). The fashionable hatter, Stephen Jones, curated an exhibition called Hats, an Anthology, a work of whimsy which proved a suprise crowed pleaser at London’s V&A. When it travelled to Brisbane, 165,158 people saw it in 60 days- many of them many times over, given the population.

Small? What about Tasmania, where even the locals joke about people with two heads. (Before you criticize me for the preceding line, see the brochure for MONA- The Museum of Old and New Art – in Hobart, which announces that ‘Tasmanians (two heads etc.)’ may enter for free.)

MONA is the single most exciting art gallery to have opened anywhere since Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim at Bilbao. Sleepy Hobart is now in shock about how a native son – one David Walsh, who made his millions by developing a spread betting system for gambling on horse races- has opened a private museum, filled with his own treasures and largely funded by himself, and lured so many people to an extraordinary art space carved out of the rock and to which access is by boat.

Wim Delvoye is one of the world’s most controversial artists. He is best known for Cloaca, which replicates the process of the human intestine turning food to waste, and also for an art farm where piglets were tattooed then allowed to live for a decade, far longer than is conventional farming before their skins were displayed. Louis Vuitton and Disney are among those who have tried, unsuccessfully, to sue Delvoye for tattooing their logo’s on pigskin. MONA is the first gallery anywhere to show Delvoye’s complete exploration of religion, which includes dead mice acting out the stations of the cross and a real live man called Tim as a silent Christ-like work of art.

Australia as a radical departure? Surely yes, especially as this article does not even mention…sport.

People

A Model Career – Sunday Telegraph

A Model Career

Sunday Telegraph Magazine | May 2012 

by Marion Hume 

With pop promos, movies and exercise videos, Cindy Crawford redefined ‘supermodel’. But it is her enduring looks, professionalism and Midwest manners that have made her a superstar in front of the camera for more than a quarter of a century. 

by Marion Hume 

Cindy was never like the other supermodels, although she was certainly super. She never blended in- and not just because of that mole; she never was an all- change chameleon. She was always Cindy and that could be very disconcerting.

You’d be sitting at a show, tapping along to the music (because they played such fun music, and each track all the way through, back in the Nineties) and you’d be caught up in the designer’s vision of wherever he was trying to transport you to.

And then came Cindy. She would storm out of the wings and those black eyes would seem to lock on you like a heat-seeking missile.

Cindy was, then, like no other. She wouldn’t wear high necks (not Cindy). I can’t recall her wearing trousers (well, maybe once, at Armani). She was all woman; none of that striding through life purposefully in flat shoes. this girl was in a heel or else she was in sneakers, running like the wind.

It’s hard to imagine now that something as naff as an exercise video could be exciting, but when Cindy first did them, to fashion people, they were thrilling. We brought them, even though we knew in our heart of hearts we’d never get round to doing those squats. Who buys calendars in an age when everything is on our iPhone? But then, everyone, male and female, brought Cindy’s. She posed for Playboy and, rather than thinking it was unspeakable, we thought it was cool.

What wasn’t cool was Fair Game. a truly dreadful 1995 movie in which she played a lawyer, but a lawyer who always seemed to dress with a white vest between her shirt and her bra, all the easier to strip off the former and dive into a harbour aflame with burning oil.

Cindy, of course, recovered magnificently and kept on running. She’d been married to Richard Gere, posed with him on the cover of US Vogue and then the pair had defended their marriage with a full-page ad in The Times, but they still broke up.  However, that both have found enduring partnerships since, and have never been rude about each other, doubtless says much about each of them as well-rounded real people as well as celebrities. And hell, while the relationship lasted, they were hot.

I think Cindy and I see the cover of Vanity Fair when, famously she’s in a swimsuit and heels pretending to shave the face of KD Lang. Or she’s emerging like Venus out of a shell. There are all those Helmut Newton images. What Cindy had, perhaps uniquely, was a sizzling appeal  to men while girls absolutely adored her too, even though any fool could work out that, no matter how many lunges we did in time to her video, we could never look like her. And then there was the ‘Freedom’ video for George Michael. The excitement was palpable.

Yet while she became and remains unique, Cindy started as ‘the cut-price version’ of another girl. (Fashion is, was and always will be cruel to the young fillies entering the parade ring.) She was first known as ‘Baby Gia’, after Gia Carangi, who broke the blonde mould with her sultry, dark looks but became known for leaving fashion shoots early via the bathroom window in hot pursuit of her drug dealer. ‘Baby Gia’ turned out to be not cut-price at all but a class act.

Cindy Crawford’s reputation, from day one, as for the solid Midwestern values she has brought with her from DeKalb, Illinois (known pre-Cindy as the ‘home of barbed wire’).  She turned up on time, well-groomed and well-spoken. But she also took control. She was known for expecting- and quite a reasonable expectation this- that shoots might also end on time, given she was always professional and expected to work, be paid and get on with her life.

That she had endured should be no surprise to anyone. She was born with good bones and she’s worked hard for those good glutes. What I recall is her manners. I was working with a film crew backstage when a phalanx of ‘Cindy and Richard’ security swept through so fast, they knocked me off my feet and into a rail of eveningwear. ‘Oh!’ came a voice belonging to the very famous Ms Crawford. ‘Stop! Is she ok? Are you ok?’ I was, 25m of tulle being terrific cushioning for a fall.

God may have created Cynthia Ann Crawford, but manners maketh the woman, I say.

Designers

Pinstriped Prankster – Australian Financial review

Pinstriped Prankster

AFR Magazine | February 2012

by Marion Hume 

Like his impeccably tailored jackets that swing open to reveal a bounce of cheeky colour, Nottingham­born Paul Smith is a cautious if somewhat laid­-back businessman with a flair for the quirky and the original. The hugely successful joker in the pack talks to Marion Hume ahead of opening his first Australian store in Melbourne.


In photographs, Paul Smith (correctly, Sir Paul Smith-although he doesn’t use the title) can look a bit miserable like he’s got a stone stuck in his shoe. This is odd and not only because you’d think the chairman, designer and- with his childhood sweetheart-co-owner of a world famous brand with a turnover of £171.6 million ($257.5 million) would have something to smile about. What’s discombobulating is that in real life the man with the everyman name is all joy. The living breathing Paul Smith, as opposed the glum chap through the lens, makes you wish he’d invite you to lunch. With all due respect, you don’t say that about Giorgio Armani.

His appeal, like his clothes, is a simple equation: straightforward + quirky, with a sense of humour. In business, he’s not grasping. The arc of Paul Smith ltd has been steady, not greedy. The London HQ is full of people who hold open doors for each other and smile a lot, but not in a creepy way because the boss is watching. As for when the boss is being watched, he’ll be in a good suit and carrying a good man-bag, from which he might pull a rubber chicken.

Every year, Suzy Menkes, the doyenne of global fashion,  hosts The International Herald Tribune Luxury Summit, a pay-thousands-to-attend gathering which is the frock-world version of Davos. Industry titans take it so seriously, they hire writers and coaches to help with their strictly-timed 20 minute speeches. When it was Paul Smith’s turn to share knowledge of a business he’s been in since the early 1970s, he bounded onto the stage, pulled out an alarm clock, mucked up his PowerPoint and then, when clanging from the clock signalled time up, delivered his final piece of advice; if you are nervous about a meeting, bring a silver briefcase that opens up to reveal a train set. Because who doesn’t love playing with a train set?

In April, a Paul Smith store will open on Melbourne’s Collins Street, which raises the obvious question “what took so long?”- especially as Smith himself has no qualms baout long-haul travel (he’s been to Tokyo more than 80 times). The brand has successful relationships with David Jones and Sydney independent retailer Robbie Ingham. “I heard Prada are planning to open 80 shops this year. We want to move forward when it feels right, not be aggressive”, is Smith’s own explanation.

He does what he thinks is right, including flying to Japan, where he has more than 200 stores and over 1,000 staff, as soon as he heard about last year’s tsunami and the Fukushima meltdown. He was on the 42nd floor, when the aftershocks hit Tokyo. “It was scary and there was the radiation worry but I thought I should just go and give people who have worked for me for 20 years a hug, especially as everyone else was leaving.”

Paul Smith, born 5th of July 1946, is 65 (although when I ask, he says 63) and the life arc goes like this; young lad from Nottingham in what was once Britain’s clothing manufacturing heartland, wants to be professional racing cyclist, leaves school at 15, has accident aged 17, six months in hospital, starts working in shop, thinks he might as well have his own shop and is encouraged by his girlfriend, Pauline Denyer (now his wife)  to take a space down a back alley with a rent of 50p a week.

Soon, he starts mixing in his own stuff, inspired by the garb of the working men of a big industrial city, in amongst hard-to-find labels and jeans imported from the US. By 1976, he’d showen the  first menswear collection under the Paul Smith label in Paris and opened a store in London’s Covent Garden, near what was then the rat-infested fruit market (which closed down in 1979). Forever dubbed “classic with a twist”, that label-which mixes unexpected flashes of colour with solid blokey darks- is now attached to menswear, womenswear, jeans, shoes, scent, eyewear, watches, pens, furniture, rugs and bikes.

Of the latter, you can’t miss the sherbet pink bike in the crazy lair that is Paul Smith’s own office within his London HQ. While most of the building looks familiar if you’ve visited stores kitted out in lovingly salvaged old wood, the designer/chairman’s office, which is about the size of a country schoolroom, is a surprise. Every surface – every bit of wall, every inch of floor – is littered with stuff; fine art mixed with daft kids toys, exquisite mid century furniture topped by an Aussie bush hat and a joke giant spider (he apologizes that the battery has gone flat so he can’t make it crawl all over me).

“There are lovely things in here. And there are hideous things and cheap things and expensive things. I buy things and things get sent to me because I’ve got quite a reputation for liking unusual things. I’ve got this unknown person who has been sending me things for 20 years: a football, a traffic cone, a ski. And the thing is, they never arrive in a box, they always arrive as just stuff with stamps stuck on it. We call it “the stamped objects collection”. And the sender? “No idea. But when the stuff is particularly mad, I do wonder how Tom Ford or Giorgio Armani would react.”

At the thought of either of fashion’s minimalist perfectionists receiving a stamped didgeridoo, Smith lets out a schoolboy giggle. “I was on a train coming from the north of England last week and the hotel where we’d stayed, a funny little country hotel, had made us packed lunch in a Tupperware box and I thought,  ‘I’m not sure Mr. Armani would be doing this’.”

Like Armani’s, this is his own gig; a company built in his image. “ Everything here has a meaning to me,” Smith is saying as he points out a funny paper owl. “It’s about being open and not following and not looking at magazines and seeing what other people are doing and going shopping and saying ‘well, they’re doing that’, I’ve got a very open mind so I look at small and big and rough and smooth and kitsch and beautiful. I’m a very spontaneous person and I like things at my fingertips to take inspiration from.” With no children of his own, he says, “I think it’s the child-like mind that I enjoy because I think children are so free of education and experience.”

In terms of certificates on paper, so is Paul Smith. He has no formal fashion training, barring a night school tailoring course.  As for the business side, that’s self taught too.  “I don’t even know what an MBA is,” he replies when I ask if he’s got one. How big is your business now? How many shops do you have? I ask. “We’ve got all sorts… I’ve got it written here somewhere…a lot”. How many countries do you sell in? “Over 50”.

And the turnover? “The thing is, I know we’re doing well and we’ve never gone backwards and I know I get the weekly takings in the shops and I know which ones are doing not so well and which ones are doing better. And when they’re not doing so well, it’s usually because it was pouring with rain or snowing. We’ve never borrowed money, we own the buildings, we own the warehouses, we’ve got about 1,000 staff at Paul Smith and about 1,000 in Japan.”

So he’s rich. “I’ve got some money,” he mumbles. “I can probably spend a bit of money but it’s almost like the jam jar on the mantelpiece at your granny’s. Well, it’s never been as naïve as that but Pauline and I are quiet people and we are very fortunate to have met each other. We’ve never been searching for a Rolls Royce or a yacht or a stately home.”

Instead the couple live in a big, not grand house in Notting Hill. They have been spending summers in Tuscany since way before it was fashionable, “at a very remote farmhouse not a posh villa. What Smith is most proud of is that running “a good business and a profitable business,” means staff sharing in long-term security. “I’ve just written three cards to staff that have been with me for 20 years. So everything about it is a perfect business model, and we’ve won awards and I got a knighthood.”

In 2001, Paul Smith and Pauline Denyer left Buckingham Palace to get married, although they met when he was 21 and she was 27 and they’d been living together since 1967.  Sir Paul did think about refusing the honour – “well, it’s not really me” – but staffers said if his mum and dad had still been around, they’d be so proud. Does he use sir ever? Let’s see his credit cards. They say plain P B Smith and the signature’s exactly the same neat script as the one on the label.

Along with clothes (good solid suitings, a bit of a stripe, floral shirts and boxers; so racy when he started that idea) there has always been curios and gadgets, a mix that is familiar in the retail landscape now but wasn’t before Paul Smith started it. In the late 70s, he unearthed an old leather-bound personal organiser called a Filofax in a tiny shop hidden under an East London railway arch. The Filofax became to the 80s what the iPhone is today. While Paul Smith doesn’t have an iPhone, he’s an avid blogger, “and as a company we’re massively high-tech. We have this room in Nottingham which is like being on a space ship, which is where the brains are.  We’ve got five huge warehouses and one sends out 3 million pieces of kit a year, and it’s got 90 staff. I went in last week and immediately got goosebumps.”

When in London, he rises at 5 am and guns his tiny Mini Cooper across town to the RAC club where he swims,  “sometimes only for 10 minutes, sometimes half an hour depending on my mood, then I get into the office at six-ish with the cleaners.” Lots of his appointments these days involve the press, although rarely to toot his own trumpet. He financially supports London’s Design Museum and The Tate, so he’ll show up for those and many things connected to the arts. He’s done the interiors for Maggie’s, which has respite centres across Britain for those suffering from or connected to those with cancer. “Oh and last week a day trip to Dubai and I’m just back from Japan.”

In the early 80s, Japan was to fashion what China is now, except fashion’s players were far more parochial. When Paul and Pauline were invited to visit, they flew economy via Anchorage. He recalls the feeling: “So excited to go to this place we never thought we’d be able to see because it was so far away and so expensive. We had a modest business then. I couldn’t believe they actually wanted to have an agreement with me.” Back then, lots of European designers got Japanese deals, then faxed a few fast sketches a couple of times a year until the second-rate stuff didn’t sell and it was over. In contrast, Paul and Pauline went again and again. “I was all energy, enthusiasm, willingness. So I think it’s not a miracle we’ve done well in Japan”.

He doesn’t speak Japanese and uses jokes to communicate. “Providing you get the timing right, humour is fantastically important”, he says. “I think I have learned my discipline and the importance of cut and shape and being modest and down to earth from Pauline. But from my dad, I got the skill of communication. He passed away when he was 94 and he still had young friends.” Smith has yet to crack Chinese humour and so the Chinese market. “We’ve got a good business in Hong Kong and from this year, we’re entering into mainland China. Most of the brands that do well there have very identifiable logos. But with Paul Smith, there’s none of that, so I’ve been holding back.  And now there’s a younger generation of 17-25 year olds that are quite big Paul Smith fans.”

A lack of bold logos notwithstanding, counterfeiters is rife. “We have full-time lawyers on it, we have the merchandise destroyed but it starts again round the corner.” Or in plain sight in the case of Bali, where the fake Paul Smith stores are well known to Australian travellers. “I use the word ‘disappointed’,” says Smith. “When there’s thousands of talented fashion students, many of whom come from Asian countries, why not let them work from a blank sheet of paper and do something new?”

When a designer owns his company and is 65 (or 63 by his own count) it invites a question that is never easy to ask. “The answer is not clear and it’s something we talk about  [and] then immediately push to one side,” is his reply. “There is a very good team, we do everything in-house: design, press, marketing, shop design, architecture, no shareholders. That’s the joy…We still have the possibility of growing the business. Now we’ve got Melbourne and we could open Sydney and we’ve got Amsterdam coming up. We don’t need to grow massively because there’s no one pushing us to grow.”

He’ll come out to Melbourne for the shop opening and the store will, doubtless, have that intrinsic mix of plain darks with bold shots of colour. “although there are still taboos about what men can wear.”, he says. “I had one of my lads in the other day and he got a shirt with polka dots on it and he came in the next day and said he’d had it on at breakfast and all his kids burst out laughing. We’ve got more of a reputation for colour than actually what we sell. If you were to look at the figures, you’d find the bulk of what we sell are navy blue suits, masses of white shirts, navy blue sweaters.”

And what relationship does the Paul Smith woman have with the Paul Smith? “They could be a couple. I do five lines for men and three lines for women. As the businesses grow, you are attracting a broader audience, but in my head, my boy and my girl are skinny, boyish figures.” Just like Paul and Pauline, now just as when they were young. “Yes, we’re both skinny, long-limbed. We both love tailoring, we both love simplicity and that’s what has attracted me really”.

Ethical Fashion, People

Amazing spider-men – The Financial Times

Amazing spider-men

The first-ever spider silk cape-a glowing, golden piece-will be unveiled this month at the V&A

The Financial Times | 15th January 2012

By Marion Hume

The myths date back more than a hundred years: of a gift to Queen Victoria of a pair of spider silk bloomers hailing from Madagascar; of how a delicate yet spectacularly strong yarn found its way into stockings made for Empress Josephine.

There was, these stories said, a sustainable way to harvest and use spider thread. And, unlikely as it sounds, the Victoria & Albert Museum this month unveils the first-ever spider silk cape, a glowing, golden piece that is as much about two men’s determination to work with nature as it is a desire to make fairy tales come true.

Briton Simon Peers has lived in Madagascar since 1989 with his Malagasy wife Ange and their two sons. He gave up a job as an art dealer at the Fine Art Society in London to move to the Malagasy capital Antananarivo (known as “Tana”), to reinvigorate the business of Madagascar’s exquisite silk traditions (this from silkworms, not spiders). He imported looms from Yorkhire to create jacquards, passementerie and embroidery of Versailles standards of craftsmanship. The world’s leading decorators, including Peter Marino, Robert Couturier and David Mlinaric, have become loyal customers.

Peer’s partner is American Nicholas Godley, whose grandmother was born in Madagascar. He arrived in 1993 as a development economist to work on raising living standards in one of the world’s poorest countries. Then he set up a handbag label, Majunga, employing hundreds and using native raffia,and sold bags to Neiman Marcus and Saks.

Peers and Godley had been friends for years when, one day in 2003, Godley asked about a strange contraption on a shelf in Peers’ office. “I told him it was for extracting silk from spiders,” recalls Peers. Godley was more than intrigued; he was determined to push Peers to turn a daydream into reality.

Peers was obsessed with the island’s large female golden silk orb-weaver spider (Nephila madagascariensis), famous for creating the most symmetrical and concentric of spider webs. He’s come a tale of how Paul Camboue, a French Jesuit priest, had tried to extract spider silk and how these efforts had attracted the attention of a 19th-century French colonial administrator called Nogue (his first name lost to history), who was looking for industries to set Madagascar apart from other francophone colonies. It was Nogue who had designed the machine Peers had on his shelf- a guillotine-like trap (although its occupants emerge unharmed) that could hold eight spiders while the threads were pulled from their bodies on to a bobbin.

“Think of the times you have brushed a spider off your sleeve,” Peers says. “You flick and it falls but is still attached to you by a silken thread. The silk comes out without any problem.”

At the end of the 19th century, such was the excitement about the possibilities for spider silk that spider catching was considered a top job for locals in Antananarivo. There was even a technical college there, set up to train spider silk weavers. In 1900 a set of Malagasy spider silk bed hangings, now lost, was exhibited in Paris. But enthusiasm waned, not least because of hte challenges of lodging and feeding hundreds of thousands of carnivorous cannibals needed for every yard of silk. Spider silk also turned out to be at least 2o times more costly than the “boil in the bag” method by which silkworms dies to release a strand of thread.

A century on, however, Peers and Godley decided to give it another try. In 2004, they started “silking” spiders and by Novermber 2008, the elusive silk became reality. “Having silked over a million spiders, we are transforming the resulting stock into a singer unique and extraordinary golden textile,” Peers says.

The challenge of food and lodging was solved by using only females, brought to the silking facility each morning by a team of 80 spider catchers and then released into the wild later that afternoon.

In 2009, Peers emailed me to say: “We are making this extraordinary cape. Homage to the spider. And apart from another-probably apocryphal story-of a suit of spider silk clothes made for Louis XIV, this will be the first time any serious piece of clothing has ever been attempted.”

Three years on, he calculates that the weaving, embroidery and applique of the cape has involved 6,000 human hours, while at least 1.2m spiders have been employed. Each of the hundreds of thousands of warp and weft threads comprises 96 individual strands of spider silk in the ground weave of the decorated panels and 48 individual strands for each thread in the lining. each pass of the needle to create the embellishments of appliqued spiders scuttling over flowers required 96 strand threads. The golden glow is the natural colour of the silk.

Peers and Godley have no ambition to find a more industrial application for their breakthrough. “Our objective has not been just conquering the technical challenges, but also to engage people with an emotional and intellectual experience,” says Peers. “This lengthy and arduous process is the antithesis of the brief, ephemeral life of a web.” The result, they hope, will live on, and not just in stories.

‘Golden Spider Silk’, V&A Studio Gallery, January 25-June 5