The city of Lubbock is part of an area that is the largest cotton-growing region in the world. By about 1960, Lubbock had acquired the slogan “Cottonest City in the World.” The slogan is not part of official tourism promotion and has never been trademarked.
   
Pietra Rivoli’s 2005 book, The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, brought greater attention to the “cottonest city” slogan.
 
 
Wikipedia: Lubbock, Texas
Lubbock (IPA: /‘lʌbək/) is an American city in the state of Texas. Located in the northwestern part of the state, a region known historically as the Llano Estacado, it is the county seat of Lubbock County, and the home of Texas Tech University. According to an estimate by the U.S. Census in 2006, the city population was 212,169, making it the 90th largest city in the United States and the 12th largest in Texas. The Lubbock metropolitan area has a population of 261,411.
 
Lubbock’s nickname is the “Hub City” which derives from being the economy, education, and health care hub of a multi-county region commonly called the South Plains. The area is the largest contiguous cotton-growing region in the world and is heavily dependent on irrigation water drawn from the Ogallala Aquifer.
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Economy
The Lubbock area is the largest contiguous cotton-growing region in the world and is heavily dependent on irrigation water drawn from the Ogallala Aquifer. However, the aquifer is being depleted at a rate that is not sustainable in the long term. Much progress has been made in the area of water conservation and new technologies such as Low Energy Precision Application (LEPA) irrigation were originally developed in the Lubbock area.
 
Adolph R. Hanslik, who died in 2007 at the age of ninety, was called the “dean” of the Lubbock cotton industry, having worked for years to promote the export trade. Hanslik was also the largest contributor (through 2006) to the Texas Tech University Medical Center. He also endowed the Texas Czech Heritage and Cultural Center’s capital campaign for construction of a new library museum archives building in La Grange in Fayette County in his native southeastern Texas.
 
Google Books
Field to Fabric:
The Story of American Cotton Growers
by Jack Lichtenstein
Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press
1990
Pg. 20:
Thirteen years later, the Lubbock Chamber of Commerce convinced the editor of the Cotton Gin and Oil Mill Press that Lubbock was the “Cottonest City in All the World.” Lubbock officials in 1960 could point to a complex of compresses, oil mills, and gins representing a $113 million investment. The cotton complex directly employed 2885 people year round although, in peak production, jobs approached 11,000 with a payroll of $44.4 million. Furthermore, Lubbock was a retail center for the estimated 130,000 migrants who earned $45 million harvesting cotton each fall.
 
Google Books
The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy:
An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade
by Pietra Rivoli
Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
2005
Pg. 3:
Though I have traveled to dozens of countries and to almost every continent, Lubbock, Texas, was one of the most foreign places I had ever been. There is a very good chance that my T-shirt—and yours—was born near Lubbock, the self-proclaimed “cottonest city” in the world.
     
World Hum
TRAVEL BLOG
5.23.08
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Eva Holland
I’ve been working my way through Pietra Rivoli’s The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, and while it’s not really a travel book in the usual sense, I’ve found myself learning an awful lot about the various places that her T-shirt travels en route to a Key West souvenir shop. The jarring differences between the cotton fields of West Texas and the textile mills of Shanghai—and the unlikely connections the industry has forged between the two places—make for fascinating reading. Plus, you’ve gotta love the motto that Lubbock, TX, has chosen for itself: The Cottonest City in the World.