Spider silk is an extremely interesting material as it can be stronger than steel, pound for pound, yet it is extremely less dense and very flexible. Obviously it’s very difficult to harvest the silk from spiders in a practical manner, however a Japanese company called Spiber have created a new fiber-like material that is essentially synthetic spider silk. They have just recently joined forces with The North Face to create a high-end parka that is made entirely out of this revolutionary material.
They call their synthetic spider silk QMONOS, and it has taken their scientists and engineers around eleven years to create the material. They’ve worked at the molecular level to come up with this stuff, and it’s one of the toughest materials out there. Spiber then collaborated with The North Face to create the jacket known as the Moon Parka.
The Moon Parka, in terms of design, is based on The North Face’s Antarctica Parka, one of the companies most extreme winter jackets. The Moon Parka has been created to endure the most extreme conditions seen on the planet. It was essentially created with places like Antarctica and the North Pole in mind.
Spiber and The North Face are currently using the Moon Parka as a prototype, as the QMONOS synthetic spider silk is still an extremely new fiber. They are showing off the jacket in various North Face stores across Japan, and hopefully a mass produced version will be ready for sometime next year as this could potentially be one of the most promising jackets used in arctic conditions. There’s no indication as to how much this jacket would cost, but considering the synthetic spider silk has been designed at the molecular level, I can’t imagine that it will be cheap.
