Sruli Recht

Artist Sruli Recht’s design journey often begins with a fascination with materials, as was the case with this shirt. The disturbing yet compelling story of the material, Biosteel, is in keeping with many of Recht’s other projects, which employ everything from his own flesh to stillborn lamb pelts to whale foreskin. Here goats farmed in a biofactory were genetically modified to produce the protein of the golden orb spider (Nephila clavipes) in their milk, which was then used to produce the extruded synthetic fiber marketed as Biosteel.

Nearly invisible, this shirt plays on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” by evoking the vanity of the king in that tale and commenting on the unfathomable costs of creating “transgenic” organisms.

Writing of the custom-made "An Emperor's New Untangling" shirt, made of genetically modified spider silk, Reykjavik-based designer Sruli Recht poetically describes the process of knitting the suprisingly strong fibers into "the emperor's new clothing, an undergarment to protect the hearts of an empire." The "Horset," the man's corset-like garment made of horsehair, is made by "Asthildur Magnusdottir, a woman of iron will and a brain in each finger, [who] wove 3cm a day in the dead darkness of an epic Icelandic winter...from the waste products of the horse farms and slaughterhouses." These pieces show that the combination of soft, gossamer lightness and hard structure can coexist in the contemporary man's wardrobe. In Recht's words, "It's about making things that people didn't know they needed, but now can't live without-perhaps because they are functional, perhaps because they look nice, but mostly because they provide them with a new way of experiencing things in life."