HOME TRUTHS: Designtex’s Innovative, Eco-friendly Textiles

Available in five colors, Sonic fabric is an upholstery created from recycled audio tape and polyester.

Help the earth and be chic, too, with these green fabric options from Designtex's Material Matters collection. And as a bonus, the company is donating a portion of sales proceeds to the arts-focused nonprofit Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

Sonic Fabric
An aural portrait of New York City and an inspired use for post-industrial waste, this upholstery is made from recycled audiotape. Texas-based artist Alyce Santoro created the textile, which is available in copper, onyx, granite, amethyst, and cobalt. To produce it, she first recorded local street musicians on subway platforms, as well as ambient bits of conversation and street noise, onto old cassette tape, and then fed the streams into a multitrack mixer. After she transferred the finished product onto other found tape, it was knitted together with recycled polyester fiber to form the fabric. Because no finishing or backing has been added to the textile, you can hear sounds from her mix by drawing the audio head of a reconfigured Walkman over the material’s surface. $192 per yard.

Die-Cut Ingeo
Inspired by the rotunda that Frank Lloyd Wright designed for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, this lightweight textile is made from Ingeo, a biodegradable polyester fiber derived from cornstarch. Featuring a swirling, cutout pattern, the nonwoven material comes without a backing and is available in architectural white; it is ideal for draperies and scrims. $35 per yard.

Die-Cut Ingeo has a three-dimensional quality and is made from a man-made, biodegradable fiber derived from cornstarch.