Plenty of new seasons for Fashion Island

Shawbong Fok

Since opening in 1967, Fashion Island, the Newport Beach shopping

center with views of the glittering Pacific, has undergone change in

its infrastructure, reflecting the need to adapt to a dynamic

business climate.

The rationale behind such change was to remain competitive in the

Los Angeles metropolitan area, one of the world’s great shopping

destinations akin to London, Paris, New York and Tokyo.

Fashion Island, faced with stiff competition, has transformed from

a conventional, relatively homogenous mall in 1967 to become a vibrant shopping mecca. It has specialty stores such as Via Spiga and

NIKEGoddess and luxury department stores like Bloomingdale’s and

Neiman Marcus found no where else in Orange County.

It has become a mall serving a diverse clientele, with its

children-themed stores like This Little Piggy Wears Cotton, amid

luxury stores like Hugo Boss at Gary’s. It has also become the core

of an urban-village complex known as Newport Center, ringed with

high-rises home to 800 firms and with 418 surrounding palm trees.

As a result of the change, Fashion Island provides an eclectic

shopping environment and the entertainment machine of Newport Center.

Today, Fashion Island has digital sound movie theaters, gurgling

fountains, lushly landscaped paseos, intricate Spanish-inspired tile

work and a food court, all added in 1989 during a $100 million-plus spending blitz that attempted to boost profit during a time of

lagging sales. It provides a Mediterranean lunchtime retreat for

workers in the surrounding offices and an outdoor, theme park-like

place for families on the weekends.

“We get a lot of families on the weekends and mostly office

workers with a suit and tie during lunchtime on the weekdays,” said

Ryan Hunter, a host at the California Pizza Kitchen in Fashion

Island.

Fashion Island isa central organ to Newport Center’s function as

an edge city, according to author Joel Garreau. He describes the Los

Angeles metropolis as multinucleated, with each nucleus having

clusters of retail, entertainment, commercial and residential

activity amid low-density residential spaces. Newport Center didn’t

become that nucleus until Fashion Island became an entertainment

haven starting in the late 1980s.

Much of the nuclei are on the fringes of the Los Angeles urban

galaxy far from its downtown core -- hence the term edge city.

Newport Center, more than 40 miles from downtown Los Angeles, is one

of them, along with Irvine Spectrum and South Coast Plaza.

Although Newport Center had its towering offices and its mall

throughout the 1970s and 1980s -- all in proximity to residential

areas -- the community activities and movie theaters that form the

family-oriented part of Fashion Island today were absent.

Fashion Island added those in the late 1980s to win clients and

catch up with South Coast Plaza, the jewel of shopping centers in

Orange County.

“Newport Center is self-functioning. It is utopia. Fashion Island

is a manufactured paradise with all the palm trees, specialty stores,

fountains, and movie theaters. Things are close together so that you

don’t have to drive. It is a dream,” said Ashley Nemeth, who has

lived in Newport Beach for 20 years.

The edge city concept certainly works for some people.

“I come to Fashion Island to eat and shop because it is close to

my work,” said Jeff Collins, who works at Pacific Life, one of the

800 firms encircling Fashion Island. “That is the main reason why I

come here.”

The mall is family oriented, said Beatrice Marshal, a Corona

resident and a longtime fan of Fashion Island.

“You see a lot of kids’ places here like the carousel. There is a

kid’s haircut place. It makes you feel young.”

Fashion Island in Newport Beach, where the median family income is

$111,166, has several exclusive, high-end stores that have

traditionally been a part of the mall since 1978, when Neiman Marcus

moved in, making it the Rodeo Drive of the South.

Teuscher is one such store, based in Switzerland and serving

chocolate. Its truffles, jet-flown from Switzerland every week,

typically cost $1.71 apiece.

“Our customers are rich and high-class,” said Jamie Johnson, a

sales associate.

Yet Fashion Island retains its family atmosphere in spite of the

upscale shops. There are community events such as the Summer Concert

Series, the Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony and the Menorah Lighting

Ceremony, said Nina B. Robinson, vice president of marketing at the

Irvine Company, retail properties division.

By the late 1990s, Fashion Island became the second-highest

grossing mall in Orange County, with 14-million visitors annually. “I

come to the mall because of specialty stores,” Anaheim resident Tanya

Briley said. “There are stores you can’t find anywhere else.”

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