The Amazon Coat: An Oral History
“You’d walk down the street and you’d be like, We did this. For better or for worse.”
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Even with a decade of trendspotting, deal hunting, and expert interviewing behind us, few stories compare to that of the Orolay coat. As the tale goes, in March 2018, former New York fashion director Amy Larocca appeared behind features editor (then–associate editor) Katy Schneider’s desk with a hot tip: “There’s this coat I need you to look into. It’s $89, and every woman I know on the Upper East Side has it.” In the months and years following Schneider’s reporting, the coat became so ubiquitous in the city that it earned its own nickname: “the Amazon Coat.” Here is an oral history of the Orolay coat — from its uptown origins to its eventual banishment to Buffalo Exchanges — according to the whisper network of women who set off the trend, the New York staffers who broke the story, and several folks who covered the coat’s unlikely takeover of the city.
“Women were crossing the street to ask me where I got the coat.”
No one knows exactly who bought the Amazon Coat first, but a daisy chain of women shared the link with friends and strangers until it caught our attention as a thing.
Jessica Reich, teacher: “It was actually in 2016 that I purchased the coat, so it’s been about ten years. It’s crazy. I was planning a trip for a joint 30th birthday with my boyfriend at the time to Iceland. I was just doing what I do whenever I’m going to travel to a new place, which is look around and see what gear I need. I was going in March, so I was really interested to see what type of winter gear I would need, and I found this blog — I don’t know if she’s around anymore, but it was called The Blonde Abroad. This was obviously back when you didn’t necessarily go on someone’s Instagram to find clothes and stuff. You were literally going to their blogs. So I was probably just searching ‘Iceland fashion,’ something along those lines, and she popped up. She had this coat and linked it, and I was like, This is amazing. So I just bought it through her link.”
Kiki Rich, author of The Blonde Abroad: “It came from this picture of me in Whistler. We had helicoptered into this snowy mountain peak, and that picture — this was pre–the term, even, viral, I think — it just got so much attention. Then even my own audience was like, ‘Where’s that from? Where’s that from?’”
Fernanda Niven, founder of homeware brand the Bouwerie: “I found out about it because a friend of mine had one and I saw her in it and nobody else was wearing it. I think she just discovered it on Amazon. I loved it, and I said, ‘Can I find out where you got that coat?’ She told me and I bought one immediately and I started wearing it around the Upper East Side. It was unbelievable. Women were crossing the street to ask me where I got the coat.”
Reich: “I kept wearing it. It just started to become a thing. I was a teacher at the preschool at the 92nd Street Y at the time. So the moms at school and the other teachers were like, ‘Oh, tell me about the coat.’ And then at the time, it was relatively, from my standpoint, inexpensive. It’s funny the article has updated itself to reflect the current price. But I think back when I got it, it was well under $100. It might have been $70, $80 at the time.”
Niven: “I’ve never had anything like that happen to me before, where it was just like girl after girl, woman after woman asking me, ‘Wait, I’m so sorry to ask — where is that coat from?’”
“It was like our Watergate.”
One March morning, then–New York fashion director Amy Larocca was discussing the latest trends with her friend and former market editor Gretchen Fenton. The coat she’d be seeing around, it turned out, was from a then-unknown brand you could find on Amazon called Orolay. When she got back to the office that day, she tipped off Schneider (now features editor, then associate editor) and Alexis Swerdloff (now deputy editor, then Strategist editor), who got right to work.
Amy Larocca: “Gretchen was like, ‘Do you know about this coat?’ I was like, ‘Yes, I have seen this coat.’ And she was like, ‘Do you know the thing about it?’ And I was like, ‘What about it?’ She was like, ‘It’s from Amazon.’”
Katy Schneider: “We immediately knew it was such a great story. We were super freaked out about getting beat.”
Larocca: “I was always telling Alexis and Katy things. I’m sure I probably just got back to the office and I was like, ‘All right, guys. Hot tip.’ I did not think it was gonna be this hot a tip.”
Alexis Swerdloff: “It was like our Watergate.”
Schneider: “It was a perfect daisy chain. Every single person told me someone else to call and gave me their number. It’s not so easy to get this kind of reporting or to get quotes like this.”
Niven: “I felt like if someone was calling to talk to me about it, it meant that clearly she had been noticing it around.”
Schneider: “I was going the next day to Florida for a family trip. I was just like, ‘I am so determined to figure out what’s going on with this Amazon coat that I’m not letting it go.’ I remember I was with my family and I was at the airport sitting at a table on the phone with one or two of those women from the lede, just being like, ‘Tell me where you got the coat.’”
Larocca: “I think it’s the ultimate Strategist thing because it was cheap. I think that was so in the spirit of the Strategist — like, ‘Amazing finds. We do the hunting for you.’”
Schneider: “It was just one of these things where Amy had stumbled upon such a phenomenon. That was evident immediately when I started reporting. Every single person who I called immediately knew what I was talking about, immediately had another person to connect me to. And it came together super quickly.”
“It was so much bigger than anyone could have imagined.”
After our story went live, dozens of publications covered the coat’s unlikely rise to popularity — and more people bought the coat than we could count. One woman even made an Instagram account under the handle @theamazoncoat that accrued more than 10,000 followers as it documented the women and men wearing the coat across the country.
Schneider: “It was so much bigger than anyone could have imagined. I remember it being very strange to see the effect of that in real life over the next couple of not just months but years. For years after that story, seeing people wherever I went in that coat on the street was crazy.”
Swerdloff: “You’d walk down the street and you’d be like, We did this. For better or for worse.”
Larocca: “I always thought, All my years at New York Magazine and my biggest contribution is the frickin’ Amazon Coat.”
Swerdloff: “It was a little secret you’d have. I remember being in a room with all these people being like, Well, you’re wearing this sort of because of me. I mean, not me, multiple people, but it was a very strange feeling to have.”
Lucy Handley, freelance journalist who covered the coat for CNBC: “We had this stand-up meeting with a couple of editors and maybe 12 journalists who wrote for the website, and I remember saying, ‘Oh, there’s this Amazon coat.’ Immediately, my editor went, ‘What’s the Amazon Coat?’ There was this level of intrigue because I guess at the time you might not have associated Amazon with fashion.”
Making its Good Morning America debut.
Reyhan Harmanci, executive director at Wired who wrote about the coat for the Times: “I totally bought it. I couldn’t believe the price. It was so cheap, and it was really, really warm. But it was then a bit uncanny to be wearing the same thing as literally every other woman I could see.”
Handley: “It’s a baggy, kind of casual, a bit oversize style that I think is still fashionable now. I can see the picture I used. The model in the picture was wearing skinny jeans, and that was the big trend. Athleisure was just starting, so yoga leggings with a big top.”
Swerdloff: “This idea of a viral item wasn’t really a thing at the time. The only other thing I could think of at the time that was sort of like that was the Instant Pot. There just weren’t items that went viral on the internet in that way. It was really one of the first that I can remember like that and that you would just see out in the world and everywhere. That happens now all the time.”
Harmanci: “This was before lanternflies, but it had the invasion kind of vibe.”
Larocca: “My kids were pretty little, and they would be like, ‘Mom, the coat, the coat!’ It became a family joke. I remember sitting in the subway and being like, Oh my God, there are multiples in this car. What is happening? That is so crazy. This just sort of blasted in out of nowhere.”
Lauren Posner, creator of the @theamazoncoat Instagram account: “A lot of my friends and people I knew had the coat, so I just thought, Oh, why don’t I just start taking pictures of people wearing the coat? And if they want to answer a question — why they bought the coat, what drew them to the coat, why does it inspire them or something quirky — and just put it on Instagram, it would be fun. But that was also a time when a lot of Instagram accounts like that were coming about.”
Harmanci: “I somehow managed to write about this at least a year after you guys had done multiple stories, so it’s really amazing anyone let me write about it.”
Posner: “There were people who did outrageously creative things. Someone made a cake that looked like the Amazon Coat, and they used the hashtag #theamazoncoat. I would also look for posts that had the hashtag and repost them.”
Harmanci: “Everyone I talked to seemed to have a different way into it. Like, some people had seen the New York Magazine story, but a lot of people just saw it on the backs of their friends or saw a picture of it or it was a hand-me-down coat from somebody. It just seemed like no one really knew where the coat came from.”
“I remember seeing the coat at Buffalo Exchange, and I was like, Okay.”
Over the years, Orolay released ankle-length and cropped versions, a fleece-lined variation, and even a line for kids, but the Amazon Coat was eventually demoted to the back of closets or pawned off to Buffalo Exchange during the pandemic. Still, the original coat has amassed more than 29,000 reviews on Amazon (that’s up from 6,000 in 2019) with an impressive four-and-a-half-star average rating. Every Prime Day when it goes on sale, readers still buy it. Will it ever have a nostalgia-fueled resurgence?
Harmanci: “It was two winters. First winter was early adopters. Second winter was the rest of us. And then it was kind of gone. I do think that all of the new variants helped kill it. One of the fun things about the coat originally was that it was so basic. You had two or three colors, maybe — no other options. It was at a moment where you had these formfitting puffy coats. It was a real choice to be wearing this puffy square, essentially, with these pockets hanging out. It was not an elegant coat, but it was extremely comfortable and extremely warm. I think that helped its lanternflylike recognizability because it was so differently and awkwardly shaped.”
Emily Gould, New York features writer: “When I would first see an Amazon Coat in the wild, I would be like, Oh, she’s got the Amazon Coat. And then it eventually just became ‘the Coat.’”
Megan Reynolds, freelance writer and editor who wrote about the coat for Jezebel: “It’s like the Spider-Man meme — you’re all pointing at each other in the same fucking outfit. To me, that’s kind of what killed the coat.”
Niven: “I wore it so much, and I kind of got sick of it. Then seeing it everywhere, you’re wearing it and you’re seeing it, so it’s overload. But I still love the navy one. I still have it, and every once in a while, I break it out.”
Reich: “It definitely will always have a place in my closet.”
Larocca: “I never wanted to see it again.”
Posner: “Believe it or not, I still wear it occasionally, especially on really cold days. I still see plenty of people wearing it as well.”
Swerdloff: “I remember seeing the coat at Buffalo Exchange, and I was like, Okay.”
Reich: “I wonder if some people will think, Oh, I just came upon this, not knowing that it’s been around for so long. Or other people might be like, Wow, this is a throwback.”
Larocca: “Is the Amazon Coat going to have one of those hilarious revivals of ‘It’s so pre-COVID’ or whatever they decide to call that era?’”
Swerdloff: “Is it gonna come back in style? Is it going to be like suddenly you’re going to see Liana Satenstein wearing the Amazon Coat? I don’t know.”
The Amazon Coat through its spawns
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