‘A trailblazer’: The Winnipeg single mother who launched a turn-of-the-century costuming empire

Descendants of pioneering Winnipeg costumer are keeping the family tradition alive

The work of a Winnipeg-born costumer has made its way into hundreds of theatrical productions, movies, television shows, and even to the sidelines of CFL games.

Yet, beyond the hoop skirts and petticoats, few know the story of the struggling single mother who launched the costuming empire from a small storefront in downtown Winnipeg.

“There were very few women who would run their own store in those days,” Tanyss Malabar told CTV News Winnipeg.

“She was, in her era, certainly a trailblazer.”

Sara Mallabar opened “Mallabar’s Theatrical Costumier” in Winnipeg in 1904.

At the business’ height, there were stores in Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal, Edmonton, and Ottawa bearing the Mallabar name, though the outposts and subsequent offspring dropped an L to differentiate from the flagship.

The shops sold and rented costumes, dance, and formal wear to the public, as well as to theatre companies, pipe bands, and movie and television productions.

While many locations have since shuttered or changed hands, the matriarch’s 116-year costuming legacy is still very much alive and well.

‘Just a trunk of costumes’

The store’s founder, Sara Mallabar, got the idea to open the business after a fateful visit to a fortune teller, her granddaughter Tanyss told CTV News Winnipeg.

At the time, Mallabar was depressed, to say the least.

The mother of four had recently moved back to Winnipeg from Mexico after an unimaginable onslaught of tragedy; both her brothers died in separate railway accidents, quickly followed by her husband, John, after a long battle with tuberculosis.

A skincare business she launched with his life insurance money back in Winnipeg subsequently failed, and she couldn’t afford to feed her children.

Seeking wisdom from the beyond, the fortune teller summoned a vision of Sara working “in an odd business with lots of clothes,” Tanyss recalled.

With that, Sara remembered seeing a ‘For Sale’ sign on a small shop that sold costumes and hair goods.

“There was just a trunk of costumes, so she borrowed money from her family and started the store that way,” Tanyss said.

That $300 loan launched what would become a family business, first costuming productions by churches and local theatre groups and then touring companies, flocking to entertain a city experiencing a railway-fueled boom.

“There were a lot of amateur productions. There were also touring productions, so in Winnipeg in particular, we were likely to get professional companies from places like Minneapolis and Chicago,” explained Colette Simonot-Maiello, associate dean of the University of Manitoba’s Desautels Faculty of Music.

According to Tanyss, Sara’s four children helped bookkeep, print catalogues, and mind the storefront while Sara, a trained seamstress, made the costumes.

The children soon grew and so did the business.

Each moved to open new shops in Toronto and Montreal, rebranding the storefronts and their names to Malabar - one L.

As the years went on and the family multiplied, the stores were passed on to the next generation, ready to supply costumes for a production of “The Barber of Seville” or to the trick-or-treater seeking out the best fake blood or witch’s hat.

A family business splintered

Scott Malabar, Sara’s great-grandson, grew up working at the Hargrave Street location, packaging sequins, filling bottles with spirit gum, and sweeping the floors.

“Little jobs that nobody wanted to do,” he said.

His father, Ross, Sara’s grandson, ran the business. He made it clear he expected his son to take over one day, as so many Malabars had done before him.

But working alongside his father as an adult proved difficult.

“My father and I agreed to disagree,” he recalled.

“We weren’t very good at working together, and so I left the company and had to agree not to compete with them.”

Five long years later, Scott and his wife Jan opened Harlequin Costume.

“We started very small, building costumes, because that’s what we knew,” Jan said.

“Things like masquerade costumes and very basic stuff for parties and Halloween.”

Much like Scott’s great-grandmother before him, the business found its footing in theatre, creating costumes for the Gilbert and Sullivan Society and Rainbow Stage.

Through their success, family tensions continued to boil over.

Vendors refused to sell to them, Jan recalled, over concerns Mallabar would pull their own orders from any company doing business with Harlequin.

At one point, Mallabar opened a location next to Harlequin’s then Portage Avenue shop during peak season – Halloween.

“It was very contentious. It was ugly to the point where our two daughters didn’t really get to know their grandfather.”

Things came full circle in the ‘90s, when Harlequin bought and moved into the Hargrave Street building that housed Mallabar for so many years, as that business fell on financial hardship.

An iconic costumier forced to adapt to survive

John Alix bought the Winnipeg Mallabar business in 1995 with four employees.

Over the years, the store has had to shift with the ever-evolving business landscape.

Alix said it’s been a challenge to survive.

“Bigger businesses see smaller businesses doing well, and they’ll come in and take over the industry by cutting costs,” he said.

“We were a pretty good-sized business and it wasn’t because of my business acumen. We just kept downsizing. We were big enough that we survived.”

Some Malabar outposts have not fared as well.

Locations in Montreal and Edmonton have subsequently closed.

Most recently, the iconic Toronto location shuttered in 2022. Its then owner, master tailor Luigi Speca, was ready to retire.

‘The costumes are fabulous’

Though many Malabar brick-and-mortars have come and gone, its legacy lives on in the thousands of costume pieces that can still be seen and worn today all over the globe.

The Winnipeg location’s collection of rentable costume inventory was sold to Kristen Andrews, former Mallabar employee and owner of vintage costumer Ragpickers.

In organizing and caring for the thousands of pieces that have outlived decades of theatrical wear and tear, Andrews has become a costume historian, of sorts, tracing the origins of the sparkly flapper dresses to a decades-old production of “Sweet Charity” or a 17th-century pirate coat.

“I started to realize that there were a lot of really classically designed pieces that were made for Rainbow Stage and for some important shows in Winnipeg entertainment history, and I didn’t want to see those things get lost.”

Similarly, Malabar’s sprawling opera costume inventory from the Toronto shop was purchased by Sarasota Opera – a 30-year client of Malabar.

Twelve semi-trucks carrying boxes containing roughly 80,000 costume pieces were shipped south of the border.

Today, they hang in a 16,000-square-foot, temperature-controlled warehouse, primed to costume any aria-performing diva in need.

“The costumes are fabulous,” said Richard Russell, Sarasota Opera’s general director.

“When you go through the collection, you see the real quality of the work they did. The craftsmanship on these costumes is amazing. They also have to be very durable because they have to go through multiple performances.”

‘She was an amazing woman’

Mallabar’s legacy lives on beyond the Edwardian gowns and Viking hats.

Scott named his daughter Sara as a nod to his glass ceiling-breaking great-grandmother.

“She was a very driven person. It wasn’t an easy life for her to open the business and try and bring up four kids, but she managed to do it.”

Her influence extends beyond the name.

After spending her childhood trying on period top hats at the Hargrave Street Mallabar store and watching her parents’ work shine on stage, Scott’s daughter Sara joined the theatre business herself.

She is currently Shakespeare In The Ruins’ general manager.

“The namesake demonstrated to all of the women in our family very early that we were going to be capable of doing anything that we decided to do or wanted to do,” she said.

Meanwhile, Tanyss wrote and published a book last year about her late grandmother, the family empire and the costuming legacy that endures.

Though she describes the late matriarch as more interested in business than being a grandmother, she remains in awe of what she built.

“She started the most famous costume company in Canada, and I want people to know about that. She was an amazing woman.”