This is a true story. Once there was a tribe of people in Asia who were so poor that they did NOT dress in rags. They couldn’t afford rags. They DREAMED of having enough money to go sashaying down the main street dressed in rags.

What they did wear was cobwebs. This is not a joke. Early in the mornings, they would nip into the forests, find the largest spider webs, and take them back to the town for the seamstress to stick together into haute couture. It took more than hundred cobwebs to make each item of clothing for members of the Kucong, a tribe in southwestern China.

This was not the only odd thing about the Kucong: the women were all bald. They shaved their heads because they felt it added to their beauty.

In the past 20 years, the Kucong tribe has earned enough money to buy clothes made of the world’s finest fabrics, such as polyester and nylon.

The first thing they stocked up on was female headgear—since they discovered, to their amazement, that the rest of the people on the planet did not think bald women were cool. That must have been a memorable moment. "Can I interest you in marrying one of my daughters? They’re all gorgeous and totally bald. Hey, where you going? What’d I say?"

Today, many members wear the standard uniform of modern Asians: polyester-cotton T-shirts in misspelled English. Some young tribe members don’t even remember cobweb clothes, lamented Zheng Xianwen, a Chinese broadcaster who has followed the history of the tribe and shows off his 300-cobweb jacket on TV.

I’m all for the traditional Asian look and all that, but for some bizarre reason, I don’t fancy wearing a cobweb jacket. Maybe it’s just me, but the idea of wearing anything partly made of dead bugs is a bit of a turn-off. Not to mention the fact that I would keep visualizing 300 giant spiders turning up at my apartment to ask for their homes back. But each to his own; what do I know?

I was chatting idly about the whole cobweb clothes thing when someone told me that the US and Canadian militaries were jointly researching a project to turn spider webs into garments. Working with a company called Nexia, they plan to patent the idea. I was shown a report on the project. Spider webs are "stronger than steel by weight" the researchers say. "A strand of spider silk the thickness of a pencil can stop a Boeing 747 airplane."

How do they know this? Did they try it? Were passengers warned? "Please fasten your seatbelts as we will be flying into a giant spider web of steel-like cables to help the military with their experiments. Flight attendants will administer last rites. No hot beverages will be served at this time."

Is the North American military interested in making a fashion statement akin to that of the Kucong tribe? No. Commanders plan to use spider webs to make body armour. If they can fashion garments which are super-light yet bullet-proof, the US will be better able to do the kind of thing they do so well, such as invade country X in retaliation for crimes committed by country Y.

So if you see a group of 300 homeless spiders, send them to the Pentagon.