Affiliated with http://blog.kothea.com/ providing authorative insights for professional interior designers working with interiors fabrics on either contract or domestic projects.

Many designers ask about the durability of fabrics. Most fabrics undergo the Martindale or 'Rub' Test to check fabric suitability for various uses, i.e, curtains, domestic upholstery, contract upholstery. The test is also known as the Rub Test and it tests for abrasion - Wyzenbeek is a similar test. The Martindale test scores in 1000’s of rubs. Domestic fabrics have a rating of about 20,000 rubs. The higher the result the more suitable the fabric is for heavy usage. For example some KOTHEA mohair velvets have scores of over 100,000 making them highly usable for heavy contract scenarios in hotels.

You also might want to look <here> for details on the related Wyzenbeek test. Wyzenbeek is another (but different) kind of abrasion/rub test.

The technical details of the Martindale test are shown below but this information is not normally required to be known by an interior desinger:

A circular specimen, mounted in a specimen holder and subjected to a defined load, is rubbed against an abrasive medium (standard wool fabric) in a translational movement tracing a Lissajous figure, the specimen holder being additionally freely rotatable around its own axis perpendicular to the plane of the specimen. The normal end point of the test is when two threads are broken or in the case of pile fabrics when the pile has completely worn off. The inspection interval is dependent on the end point of the fabric and is usually every 1,000 up to 5,000 rubs, every 2,000 between 5,000 & 20,000 every 5,000 between 20,000 & 40,000 and every 10,000 above 40,000