Solid Silk Glasses

Bolt Projects designed and fabricated these Le Corbusier inspired glasses out of a novel new biomaterial. They are first of a kind, made from Bolt Threads lab grown spider silk. We developed this all in house. From industrial design of the frames to tuning the underlying process for creating the raw material to CNC machining each individual component.

To make the glasses, an aluminum mold is filled with silk powder and compressed under heat until the silk sinters into a solid. The piece is removed from the mold and cooled before finishing via CNC mill.

A skeletal brass support was incorporated to lend structure and sandwich the glass lenses into the silk body. Hinges were soldered to this skeleton, connecting the temples to the frames.

An accompanying case was created from Mylo™, a leather-like material made from mycelium. It is closed with a braided line made from Microsilk™ the same protein in fiber form as the glasses are made from in solid form.