Despite falling cotton prices, U.S. cotton production rose 40 percent between 1998 and 2001.

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As the graph shows, when cotton prices shot up in 2010, costs rose to an average 54.45 percent of sales from 53.5 percent the year before, according to the financial ratios analysis.

FORBES: Cotton's Pinch on Clothing Stores Continues

The curtainless windows were rectangles of electric-blue sky that turned to gray and then normal daylight as the patients rose and slowly, in their thin striped cotton robes, began wandering down the corridor that led into the common room.

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Ms. Blair created a cotton panel embedded with hundreds of orchid vials, one for each rose, to keep them fresh and blooming past Derby Day.

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The Mansion was also the cornerstone property of the Rosewood Corporation (Las Ventanas, Jumby Bay, the Carlyle), whose principal, Caroline Rose Hunt, purchased the palatial estate, originally the home of cotton mogul Sheppard W. King, in 1979.

FORBES: Lifestyle Feature

But farmers devoted more cropland to corn and soybeans as prices of those commodities rose, and when the U.S. economy rebounded in 2009, cotton supplies started to pull tight.

FORBES: Cotton's Pinch on Clothing Stores Continues