The women’s collection is priced between $395 for a tote bag to $15,500 for a “Laurelton” glazed crocodile leather satchel. But it’s the “Holly” clutches, which come in both satin jewel tones and leather, that will likely prove the biggest lure for fans of Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Tiffany’s 12 largest U.S. stores will begin selling the bags in September, which may also boost sales of its current range of wallets and small leather accessories.

“A blue box from Tiffany is instantly credible as a gift,” as Steven Dennis, a former Neiman Marcus executive turned consultant, tells Bloomberg. “Smaller leather goods, those are very giftable categories.”

The biggest challenge to the brand, adds Dennis: Tiffany isn’t known as a fashion or a leather-goods purveyor, and “shoppers may seek out a known label, such as Hermès, if they’re going to spend that kind of money.”

The collection — which includes day and evening handbags for women, men’s briefcases and bags, and accessories for both — was created by the designing duo formerly known as Lambertson Truex (Richard Lambertson and John Truex), who joined Tiffany about a year ago after the brand acquired their bankrupt leather goods firm from Samsonite.

The brand’s new men’s collection, which ranges from $95 for a card case to $1,395 for a crocodile travel wallet, is in step with Coach’s brand extension into men’s accessories.

Tiffany, the world’s second-largest luxury jewelry retailer, will gradually convert its top dozen flagship stores’ floor space from “unprofitable” china and crystal to make room the leather goods.

The brand’s classic Tiffany blue has been strategically employed: it’s the shade of the bags’ leather linings, with touches of the shade also found on the color enamel of the bags’ hardware. The handbags come in an array of rich shades including Tiffany blue, with the evening bags boasting Tiffany jewelry-inspired touches to add sparkle.

The “Holly” clutch is priced at $595 and echoes the Holly Golightly character played by Hepburn in the 1961 filmed adaptation of Truman Capote’s novella.

In her purse is an envelope addressed to “Mum.” Inside is a homemade card sporting a photocopy of the iconic image of Audrey Hepburn with her long cigarette holder.

“You really can have breakfast at Tiffany’s,” reads the note from her son and daughter-in-law. It also says a gift card is waiting for her on the third floor.

“An American on the ship told me to forget about the movie and read the book,” says Overton, who is from York, England. “He said it was the best thing Capote ever wrote. So I’m going out and finding it after I go in here.”

That’s impeccable timing on her part, because it’s the 50th anniversary of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. A special edition (Vintage, $12.95, paperback) of the novella is being released in November, packaged with three other Capote classics, including A Christmas Memory.

Overton disappears through the revolving door and into Tiffany’s main floor, where men in blue suits greet her with a polite nod, and the dark wood paneling, marble and mirrors still bestow a sense of security. Just as they did for Holly Golightly, Capote’s quirky, pleasure-seeking and timeless heroine.

It was to Tiffany that Golightly fled when she got the “mean reds,” which were far worse than the blues.

As she says about the store in the book: “It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it. Nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets.”

Breakfast at Tiffany’s, published in 1958 and followed three years later by the movie adaptation, has become a touchstone in American pop culture. Next to In Cold Blood, it is the book most associated with Capote. The movie remains an Audrey Hepburn classic. Its poster is one of the most sought-after by collectors, and Hepburn’s little black dress by Givenchy sold at Christie’s for just over $800,000 in 2006.

And millions still come to Tiffany, with or without a breakfast Danish in hand, to stare into the boxlike windows that once lured Hepburn.

On a recent lunch hour, hundreds of tourists from around the world, including Overton and her husband, stopped to have their photo taken under the Tiffany & Co. sign.

None of this is lost on Tiffany. The venerable jewelry store, founded in 1837, is out with a coffee table gift book, Tiffany Style: 170 Years of Design (Abrams, $50), weighing in on how Capote’s novella and the movie fit into the jeweler’s storied history.

Author John Loring, Tiffany’s design director since 1979, writes that Capote’s tale put the store “in a place in the world’s imagination that it had never previously known.”

Enter Stacy Herren, a tour guide from Salt Lake City who led 27 tourists to Tiffany’s front door shortly after Overton arrived.

“It’s the No. 1 thing they want to see on Fifth Avenue,” she says. “Everyone loves that movie.”

If Capote, who died in 1984 at 59, were alive, he’d no doubt throw a party to celebrate his book’s golden anniversary. Maybe at Tiffany. No one loved a party more. His famed Black and White masked ball at the Plaza Hotel in 1966 remains legend.

But most of the people who are associated with the book and movie are dead. Capote. Hepburn. George Peppard. Buddy Ebsen. And yes, Marilyn Monroe, Capote’s first choice to play Holly Golightly. But more on that later.

In truth, both the movie and the book were flawed.

The original reviews for the novella were mostly kind if somewhat backhanded. Many thought it funny but unrealistic.

Set during World War II in an Upper East Side brownstone filled with eccentric tenants, the book revolves around Golightly, a charmer, a deceiver and possibly a prostitute or at least a woman who relied on the kindness of strangers, mainly rich men.

Two New York institutions were not impressed with the tale. The New Yorker brushed it off, calling it “empty nostalgia.”

Capote, already an established writer with The Grass Harp and Other Voices, Other Rooms, was not pleased with such treatment and dashed off a note to the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, saying he was “hurt and dismayed,” especially since he had written for the publication.

William Goyen in The New York Times Book Review dubbed Capote, who was 34 when Tiffany’s was published, “perhaps the last of the old-fashioned Valentine makers” and accused him of dwelling in a “doily story-world.”

Norman Mailer, however, famously defended Capote, calling him “the most perfect writer of my generation” and added he would not have changed two words in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. He also said it would become “a small classic.”

He was right. According to Random House, the book remains a steady seller: For years, about 30,000 copies have sold every year.

Vintage/Anchor’s managing editor, Stephen McNabb, came up with the idea of reissuing Tiffany’s for its 50th anniversary.

“I recently reread the novel and was struck by how easily I was able to identify with the time and the place and the characters, with New York as Capote describes it,” he says. “And how kids, young adults, newcomers relate to the city, and we all hope always will. We all know people like Holly Golightly, maybe because they’ve been influenced by her, but I think because Capote created a powerful character out of a universal type.”

Gerald Clarke, author of Capote: A Biography, also reread the book this fall and says it stands the test of time.

“It’s a wonderful comedy of manners set in its time. It’s great for what it is. Truman’s writing is evocative, exact, without being pretentious. It flows so easily.”

But he acknowledges that the now-classic was only “moderately successful” in its time. “Not a flop, but not a big best seller.”

Clarke, 71, who became a close friend of Capote’s, brushes off the original bad reviews and says book reviewers are often “the most obtuse. They didn’t appreciate it, as is often the way.” But then the movie came along. “And movies change everything.”

(A special 45th anniversary collector’s edition DVD of the movie was released in 2006.)

The problem was Capote didn’t like the movie, which strayed from his original tale. Hollywood changed the ending, having Holly stay in New York City and fall in love with Peppard instead of “traveling” as Capote’s heroine was always doing. In fact, “Traveling” was on the corner of her calling card. A child bride who fled Texas for Manhattan, Holly always was searching for a place to belong.

What Capote did love was the attention it brought.

“What writer doesn’t? Truman loved being in the spotlight,” Clarke says. “But it wasn’t Truman’s movie. He loved Audrey Hepburn, but she’s totally miscast as his character. Holly was a hillbilly from Texas.”

Even Hepburn knew it.

“I was nothing like her, but I felt I could ‘act’ Holly,” she said in an interview shortly after the film came out. “I knew the part would be a challenge, but I wanted it anyway. I always wonder if I risked enough on that one. I should have been a little more outrageous.”

Another problem: Hepburn, a brunette, was 31 when she played the blond Holly (real name Lulamae Barnes), who was in her late teens.

Robert Osborne of Turner Classic Movies is amazed the movie is still so popular.

“The whole passion surprises me,” Osborne says. “It’s a lovely movie, but I think it’s curious because it’s a film with a lot of flaws to it. Audrey Hepburn is not ideal casting. She never seemed vapid or vacant enough. But Hepburn, carrying her cigarette holder, remains one of the iconic images of 20th-century movies.”

Capote’s desire for Monroe to be Holly Golightly was well known, and he wasn’t happy when Paramount Pictures chose Hepburn. (Monroe’s drama coach, Lee Strasberg, told her playing a call girl was not good for her image.)

So who inspired the free-spirited Holly Golightly, who Capote said was his all-time favorite creation? Dozens of women have claimed that the character was based on them: Gloria Vanderbilt, Oona Chaplin and Walter Matthau’s wife, Carol, among them. Capote often gave the nod to Carol Matthau. In truth, Holly was a composite of many people, including Capote’s mother and Capote himself.

Brit should pick up a copy of What Would Audrey Do? Timeless Lessons for Living with Grace and Style by Pamela Keogh, author of Audrey Style, Jackie Style and Elvis Presley: The Man. The Life. The Legend.

Audrey Style took 10 years of research, interviewing relatives and Rob Wolders, Hepburn’s partner till she died in 1993 at 63 of cancer.

This is Audrey Lite, a self-help Audrey Primer like Miss Manners.

“Audrey Style, Jackie Style and Elvis were big, serious bios,” says Keogh over the phone from New York. “This is looser, rowdier and fun. What could we learn from A.H.?”

To wear undergarments, for one.

That it coincided with the meltdowns of the Lohans, Richies and Hiltons was fortuitous but coincidental. “This took so long, I was writing it way before they all blew.”

I was smitten with A.H., as are people of all demographics. She is an icon to girls and grandparents.

“The young girls know her movies. They don’t know World War II,” Keogh says. “They see her on- screen and she seems like a nice person. She is childish and grown-up at the same time. Her honesty, beauty, vulnerability and genuine guilelessness are appealing.”

A.H. is also a style icon: white shirt, LBD, ballet flats, oversized glasses and black capri pants. She was the muse for 30 years of Hubert Givenchy. An unrepentant clothes horse, A.H. stated, pre-Sex and the City, she’d “rather have more closets than a swimming pool.”

She traveled with 52 suitcases.

“That was when she was in her career prime,” Keogh specifies. “At UNICEF, she travelled with two suitcases – one for Rob Wolders – with jeans and polo shirts.”

She was a stick figure – size 2 and a 20-inch waist – but “she made non-sexy, sexy.”

“It was her intelligence that was sexy. There was a depth to her, and sophistication,” says Keogh. “She’d look at a guy and he’d fall over.”

A.H. didn’t think she was beautiful. She thought her upper arms too thin and feet (size 10) too big.

She was born in Brussels in 1929. Her mother, a Dutch baroness, wasn’t exactly a morale booster: “Considering that you have no talent, it’s really extraordinary where you’ve got.”

“That was a `wow’”, Keogh admits. “Audrey said, `My mother didn’t mean anything,’ but it was a double-edged sword. I didn’t want people to think she is a princess and was perfect. No matter what the challenge she went through, she kept up to give other women a bit of confidence and hang in there.

“The biggest misconception about A.H. is that her life was charmed and she didn’t have challenges.”

Her father walked out when she was 6. Both her husbands (actor Mel Ferrer and Andrea Dotti, a psychiatrist) cheated on her.

“Audrey came from a very good family,” says Keogh. “It was a difficult upbringing but you had your public life and your private life and they were very separate. You behaved a certain way and didn’t go off the deep end.”

What would Audrey not do?

A.H. would never couch jump on Oprah. Heck, she’d never give Oprah an interview. She would never be in Page Six. There were no scandals, even though she had affairs (between marriages) with Sabrina co-star William Holden and Two for the Road co-star Albert Finney and dated JFK, pre Jackie.

Hepburn couldn’t be Mrs. Kennedy because she was an actress, a European and wasn’t Roman Catholic. Keogh thinks A.H. would have made a “terrific First Lady.”

“Jackie Kennedy took her style cues from A.H.,” according to designer Cynthia Rowley.

Keogh sent a copy of the book to First Lady wannabe Michelle Obama, who is “Audrey-esque” in style.

What else wouldn’t Audrey do? Be a gym rat. She smoked two to three packs of cigarettes a day and rarely exercised, but weighed 110 pounds at 5 feet 7 inches.

She had trouble gaining weight, partly due to her near starvation during the war in Holland, where she famously ate tulip bulbs and tried to make bread from grass.

What would A.H. do? Get her hands dirty. She was DIY, fixing leaky faucets, replacing fuses and ironing her own signature white shirts. “She loved gardening and mucking in dirt. She baked cakes.”