IN THESE days of fast (and often disposable) fashion, the idea of taking eight years to manufacture two unwearable garments seems outlandish. Yet this is what Simon Peers, a textile designer, and Nicholas Godley, an entrepreneur, have done. The pair has worked since 2004 on producing spider silk in Madagascar, and has woven two extraordinary pieces of clothing with the unusual fibre.

Their spider-silk shawl and cape go on display today at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London. The exhibition retraces the history of spider-silk production through books, illustrations and photographs (no spiders, sadly). The phenomenon dates from the early 18th-century, when textile producers began hunting for an alternative to mulberry silkworm. But because of the complexity of the production process, spider silk remained an experiment, with seldom more than a few garments ever produced. The last documented textile made from spider silk, a set of bed hangings, was displayed at the 1900 Paris Exhibition.

For Messrs Peers and Godley this curious endeavour started when Mr Godley spotted a reproduction of an old spider-milking machine in Mr Peers's office in Madagascar. As a textile expert and long-term resident in Madagascar, Mr Peers had come across records of French missionaries trying to extract and harvest spider silk on the island in the late 19th century; it was their textiles that had eventually been exhibited at the 1900 Paris Exhibition. Intrigued, he'd built a reproduction of the spider milking machine; spurred on by Mr Godley's enthusiasm, the pair decided to give spider-silk production a go.

The entrepreneurs initially tried to farm the arachnids. They knew they needed female Golden Orb-Weaver spiders, commonly found in Madagascar and named after the unique saffron colour of their silk and exquisite webs. But as Mr Peers explains, spiders are incorrigible cannibals, so their stock of 500 would whittle down to 50 in a matter of days. Instead, their spiders are collected every morning to be mounted on a Heath Robinson-like contraption where they are ‘milked'. Each silk filament is pulled from the spider's spinnerets by hand; it takes 24 filaments to make a thread. Once the spiders have given their all, they are released back into the wild. It's a fiddly, labour-intensive process. And yes, the spiders bite.

It has taken more than 2m of the creatures to produce the garments displayed at the V&A. Although spider silk has long been known for its mechanical properties (six times stronger than steel by weight yet surprisingly elastic), what is most surprising about the textiles Messrs Peers and Godley have produced is their exceptional beauty: they are a radiant gold colour, incredibly light to the touch and ever so slightly sticky, just like a spider web.

The textiles are true works of art. The brocaded shawl, the first garment to be produced, was inspired by the 19th-century weavings of the Merina people, the aristocratic caste from the highlands of Madagascar. The cape, which was produced specially for the V&A exhibition, was embroidered by hand in Messrs Peers and Godley's workshop in Madagascar, where they employ around 80 people; appliqué motifs celebrate the spiders' mythological aura. Mr Godley says the idea came after their first exhibition, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 2009, seemed to catch popular imagination: “I read page after page of blogs and forums wondering whether the textile was bullet-proof, Spiderman, etc; it wasn't just the scientists and the art collectors that were fascinated, but the sci-fi geeks too.”

This eclecticism is mirrored by the show's unique tour of venues. The exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History concentrated on the spider and its silk, and broke all records for visitor numbers to a single exhibit. The shawl was then displayed in the African gallery of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011, where the focus was on Madagascar's weaving tradition.

As a textile, this silk was never designed as a commercial venture—it cannot be cleaned and shrinks in contact with water. Indulgent perhaps, but as Mr Peers explains, “at a time when it sometimes feels like it's all been done, we wanted to produce something magical, something to marvel at”.

"Golden Spider Silk" is on view at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London until June 5th 2012