orange blossom.

Byline: Florence Kane

Orange County style has been quietly pervading New York lately. Example: This past summer I noticed tubsful of Rainbow flip-flops on the floor of Steven Alan in Nolita (anyone visiting from Laguna or Irvine or Dana Point probably already owns two or three pair, and would smirk knowingly to hear the salesguy sell the shoes from the seashore of San Clemente like he had just discovered the next big thing).

But the fashion conduit running from Orange County eastward runs both ways, as I soon found out: Tory Burch, the grapevine said, had sent a satellite of her New York-based business out to Costa Mesa, California, opening a new boutique in the South Coast Plaza shopping mall (others are in Los Angeles, Atlanta, New York, and Dallas, plus a new one in Greenwich, Connecticut, this month). Curiouser and curiouser about how the women of Orange County would respond to their very own, very East Coast Tory store, I hopped a flight to Southern California coast to "work" for a day.

Odds are that O.C. women will recognize Tory's name: Oprah took it to household proportions in 2005, when she had Tory as a guest on her show and wore one of her tunics on the cover of O. Perhaps that is why this Manhattan designer is betting that she can successfully plunk down her sophisticated city clothes in the unlikely setting of a West Coast supermall.

But it's not just about those famous Tory Burch tunics anymore. There are, for fall, colorful print dresses, folkloric embroidered vests, and wool trousers. Obviously, wool trousers, et cetera, might seem like a hard sell to sun-kissed Orange County customers-even those who have already banished those uber-casual velour tracksuits from their closet. No, there is no snow in the O.C. for you to trudge through in Tory's chic riding boots (not that anyone walks anywhere, anyway). It never does get bitter enough to wrap up in Tory's long leopard-print goat coat-but, nevertheless, in its first two days of business, the Costa Mesa store sold four of those coats at $2,700 apiece.

How does the Tory Burch aesthetic translate to the SoCal lifestyle?

On day two of the store's existence, I found myself on the sales floor. The doors opened at 10:00, and Orange County's glossiest women thronged inside the glossy shop, with its signature mustard-orange walls, pea-green carpet, and cozy white slipcover sofa. They were there to see Tory-who had also flown out to see her newest boutique-and to soak up some of Tory's style.