Silk has been produced for 3-4k years, can you imagine what a son-of-a-bitch that was back then? Was silk like gold and bitcoin? Somehow valuable because its such a bitch to produce? Feels like all of it is a goof on the people who accept it at face value.
Silk has unique characteristics as a material, and in a pre-plastic pre-industrial world with relatively few viable fabric materials (and all of them profoundly labor-intensive by modern standards) it would have been valuable regardless.
Obviously its rarity, social connotations, and mysterious origins had a huge effect on its value. But like gold, its characteristics alone are enough to cause people to go through the trouble to acquire it initially, enough for those other factors to take over.
IMO we shouldn't have started wearing clothes to begin with, it was a bad call. If my ancestors could have just held off on that I'd have nice thick fur right now.
I mean… if you stick to the areas that mimic the early hominid climate you don’t really need them. Lots of modern tropical tribes wear functionally zero clothing.
Silk definitely had(has) the immediate day to day use case of a comfortable fabric to wear, I can imagine that alone drove up demand. I'm sure it being difficult to produce increased it's value.
Sure gold and bitcoin are stores of value and currency, but we don't usually make our boxers out of them.
silk materials relate to a sensual world, where the touch, feel and quality of the physical embodiment is valued highly.. It is possible that English-style commerce downplays this sensual value, preferring all forms of money, e.g. rare coins, stamps, securities and financial agreements, as higher value. It is an example of a polarity.
There is a rumor that Bill Gates will not pay for art because "that is not worth money" .. he famously had giant digital screens hung in his thirty thousand square foot home, displaying reproductions of famous art without paying for them. Yet, he has spent millions of dollars building and acquiring software patents, which are applied with attorneys to generate many times that income. I suggest that is directly reflective of that cultural difference.
