How Trends — From Oat Milk To Ugly Sneakers — Get So Huge So Fast

Cauliflower was nowhere, and then all of a sudden it was everywhere. This is because cauliflower is mostly inedible unless you pretend it is pizza, and it took civilization until around the mid-2010s to realize people could make lots and lots of money by doing exactly that. Plenty of other items have been plucked out of relative obscurity and into the diets and wardrobes of millions of Americans over the past few years: oat milk, anything with CBD in it, intentionally hideous sneakers such as Fila Disruptors, alcoholic seltzer, the concept of “millennial pink,” for example. All of these things are, in short, trendy, which you probably already knew, because trends are an inescapable part of being a human. Where those trends come from is a more difficult question — a question that a particular group of people is paid a great deal to try and figure out. Read more at Vox.