That's a rather grandiose title. Silk has been loved and considered a luxury material since the time of Cleopatra, but I often feel that it is being reevaluated as something from the good old days. Well, it's not that silk has become old, but with the rise of other fibers, it's hard to deny that its good qualities have been overshadowed.
However, I think that the unique feature of silk, being the material closest to human skin, is something that other fibers cannot imitate.
The reality is that good things aren't cheap. There are many reasons why silk is considered good, such as because it is high quality, because it takes a lot of effort, because the supply is limited... but silk isn't cheap after all. That's why we can proudly say that it has characteristics and merits that other fibers don't have.
No matter how mechanized the process becomes, there is a limit to the supply of raw materials, and because silk is delicate and other materials are much more productive to produce, it is at a disadvantage when it comes to winning price competition.
Recently, there have been companies that have developed a project called Spiber, which is trying to get spiders to spin the thread that is used to make silk, just like silkworms do. There are also companies that are using the characteristics of silk to make it a benchmark for new materials, and researching how to create materials that can imitate silk.
Whenever I see or hear about things like this, I think that silk has been around for a long time, but it is also an old yet new material (in the sense that it is unique) that can connect to the future.
There are a lot of cheap and easy-to-obtain things, but in reality, there are very few things that are really what you want or that are good. It's expensive, but when you buy it after thinking about whether you need it or not, and it turns out to be really good, you feel more fulfilled and you end up using it more often... At least, I feel that this is often the case.
It's not like "it's been around for a long time = it's old",
"It's always there = it's surviving, it's a really good thing"
If people think like this, I think they will be more likely to pick up silk without having a negative image of it being expensive or weak.
Azusa