The luxury brand Balenciaga never intended to team up with critters. Even so, they featured this spider silk garment in their spring/summer 2026 collection. Spider silk is a legendary material: with higher tensile strength by weight than steel, it is also bio-friendly and deliciously soft. But making a thread from spider proteins remained the domain of eight-legged insects and Marvel superheroes — until biotechs worked things out. AMSilk in Neuried, Germany, is one of a cluster of biotechs to produce bioengineered spider yarn.
AMSilk launched its first textile product with Italian fashion giant Balenciaga, who used the biodegradable silk to make a shirt and shirtdress from the environmentally friendly thread. AMSilk is now spinning out new varieties of the bioengineered silk. Gudrun Vogtentanz, chief scientific officer at AMSilk, says: “We are adding functionality for different applications, if we want to increase the strength, or if we want to decrease hygroscopic behavior.” As the silk protein has uses in healthcare, homecare and cosmetics, and to help push the boundaries of spider silk into other industries, the AMSilk team has created an AI model. “[We can] show customers the possibilit[ies], but also when a customer comes to us and wants something, that we can address [quickly],” says Vogtentanz.
— Source: Nature Biotechnology (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-026-03062-y)
