THERE'S NO MONEY IN SKINNY JEANS

America’s love of skinny jeans once threatened the integrity of the U.S. money supply, said Ylan Q. Mui in WashingtonPost.com. Since the late 1800s, U.S. currency has been printed on a unique, cotton-blend paper, and for decades the sole supplier of that paper, Boston-based Crane & Co., relied on recycled denim scraps from the garment industry to meet almost a third of its cotton needs. But that secure source was undermined in the 1990s, when the fashion world began blending spandex with denim to create stretchier, “curve-hugging” jeans. “Even a single fiber of spandex can ruin a batch of currency paper” by weakening the cotton, and by the early 2000s it was in “almost every pair of jeans.” The company had to start buying cotton directly from the source in order avoid giving a new meaning to the term “elastic money supply.”