Sea silk: the world's most exclusive textile is being auctioned this week
On Wednesday, a curious item will be auctioned at Landmark on the Park on the Upper West Side. At first glance, there is little remarkable about lot 200, a turban-style hat with a dark golden hue. On close inspection, its threads appear similar to that of human or horse hair, but it is in fact woven of a silken fiber unfamiliar to most New Yorkers.
Indeed, objects made of the material rarely come up for auction – there are only about 60 known items in existence and the last public sale may date as far back as 1767. As the auctioneer, Bob Ross, freely admits, the estimate for the hat ($5,000-$8,000) is little more than a wild guess. “I have no idea what this might sell for,” he says. “We’ll see how well-informed the market is.”
The market could be forgiven for being ill-informed. When we think of silk we often conjure images of insects, such as silkworms, or spiders. But this particular hat has an entirely different origin. Its threads were made by a Mediterranean mollusk, the noble pen shell Pinna nobilis.
Measuring up to a meter in height, these large bivalves root themselves to the seafloor by emitting hundreds of fibers, known as byssus (think of the grizzled threads you might find on a common mussel). Once extracted from the shell, cleaned and spun, it possesses a beautiful dark chestnut color, once compared to the “burnished gold of some flies and beetles”.
Historically, items made of cleaned byssus, properly known as sea silk, have been highly prized. According to the sixth-century historian Procopius, the Byzantine emperor Justinian I gave a gift of a sea silk cloak to five Armenian satraps. Since then, the fascination with this marine fiber has not abated, reaching its peak in modern times. The British admiral Horatio Nelson wrote of his intention to send his lover, Emma Hamilton, a pair of gloves made from byssus. Jules Verne chose to dress his narrator in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Dr Pierre Aronnax, in “sea-boots, an otterskin cap, a greatcoat of byssus lined with sealskin”.
This enthusiasm did not last in the 20th century, as the material struggled to find a place in our world of synthetics. Italian fascists briefly flirted