Newsletters: It cost $6,160 to bring me to the US

I've worked in or around fashion journalism for essentially my entire career. But something I've never understood is exactly how an item of clothing goes from being unremarkable to all of a sudden being everywhere. (Apart from, you know, like this.)

I've also never been able to name my suspicion that many of the trends we read about and even participate in aren't … real? Like maybe they're just the purview of the fantastically rich and beautiful, or planted in our collective subconscious by increasingly speedy fast-fashion companies. How else to explain the dominance of all those upsetting shirts?

Rebecca Jennings captures these gnawing feelings deftly, in her breakdown of how the "Amazon coat" — a relatively affordable winter jacket that every publication you can name has touted as an absolutely viral trend in the past month — rose to such prominence. It's not what you'd expect, or maybe it's exactly what you expect, but suffice it to say it has to do with affiliate links, our culture of breathless, endlessly repetitive news coverage, and one single teacher in Upper Manhattan. I can't promise it'll make you want to buy the jacket, but I also can't promise that it won't.

—Alanna Okun, deputy editor at The Goods

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How a coat on Amazon took over a neighborhood — and then the internet

Sarah Lawrence for Vox

All winter long, in addition to crappy weather and increasingly weird news cycles, I have been terrorized by a coat.

"People are going absolutely wild over this jacket on Amazon," AOL yelled at me. "'The Amazon Coat is taking the internet by storm," shouted Yahoo. "Everyone you know is buying this Amazon coat," echoed Glamour, which sounded somehow like a threat.

These increasingly sinister warnings came from more unexpected places, too. CNBC wanted to tell me all about why this Chinese-made coat was a must-have for US consumers. Business Insider suggested that the affordable cost of the viral down parka by Orolay should terrify Canada Goose. Even the Daily Caller — the Daily Caller! — was trying to get me to buy this one particular coat.

Mind you, I tried very, very hard to avoid it. I did not click on any article or fave any tweet that told me how viral the coat is or how great it is or how affordable it is or how, actually, it's ugly and whoever is buying it is a big idiot.

This was not because I thought that the coat was overall pretty boring and looked like every other coat, which it kind of does. It wasn't just that I hadn't actually noticed anyone wearing it, which I hadn't. It was because I deeply, truly, did not want to participate in one of my least favorite forms of journalism, specifically fashion journalism: fabricating a trend from very little actual evidence.

The Amazon coat wasn't an entirely made-up fashion trend, but it certainly was the sort of trend that exists primarily because we were told it was trending. Whether it actually was is more complicated.

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The best $6,160 I ever spent: a US work visa

Dana Rodriguez for Vox

It's one thing to feel like a fraud when you tell people what you do for a living. It's another thing to pay $6,160 to ask the United States government to judge if you're a genius at it.

I didn't know applying for a work visa would involve reassessing my entire career and its impact, and repeatedly explaining how badly I wanted to return to a country whose leader kept telling the world immigrants weren't wanted. A few of my American friends half-jokingly asked, "How can I move to Canada?" Relatives asked me if it was worth giving up my government-funded health care.

For years, I had struggled to develop a media career north of the border. Despite several internships, diligent networking, and some good clips, I constantly worried I wasn't good enough to break out of low-paying entry-level gigs, no matter how hard I tried. At my first Asian American Journalists Association conference in New York, I learned there were lots of job opportunities in the US, but I needed a work visa to get any of them.

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