High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Alcantara is a tradename given to a composite material used to cover surfaces and forms in a variety of applications. The material was developed in the early 1970s by Miyoshi Okamoto, a scientist working for the Japanese chemical company Toray Industries, as a variation of their other product Ultrasuede produced around the same time. Around 1972, a joint venture between Italian chemical company ENI and Toray formed Alcantara SpA in order to manufacture and distribute the material.