Curtains for long-running show Harlequin Costume seeks to sell building, ‘staggering’ collection; dancewear store to continue under same name Made in Manitoba
By: Aaron Epp Posted: 6:00 AM CST Monday, Feb. 9, 2026

Looking to buy a building in downtown Winnipeg? Get in touch with the owners of Harlequin Costume.

If you’re interested in purchasing thousands upon thousands of costumes, you’ll want to talk to them, too.

Scott and Jan Malabar are selling their building at 375 Hargrave St., where the husband and wife have operated their costume, dance and formal wear business since the 1980s.

The asking price for the building, which sits a few blocks south of the Exchange District and a short walk from Central Park, is $995,000.

It’s a two-storey building with a full basement, covering more than 15,000 square feet. There’s open floor space on the main floor, offices on the second and a freight elevator in the rear of the building.

Right now, the second floor and basement are home to a sprawling collection of custom-made costumes that Harlequin staff have manufactured over the years.

The costumes have been used in local productions at Rainbow Stage and the now-defunct Gilbert and Sullivan Society of Winnipeg, and theatre companies throughout the United States have rented them, too.

“We’d like to sell it as a unit if possible and (hopefully) someone would keep it here in Winnipeg,” says Scott, 77. “Otherwise it may go out of town.”

Kimonos from The Mikado, hats from The Pirates of Penzance and German military uniforms from The Sound of Music are just the tip of the iceberg in the collection, which also includes Christmas-themed mascot outfits, dozens of tuxedos and hundreds of bolts of fabric.

The Malabars aren’t sure exactly how many pieces there are in the collection, though Harlequin’s website describes it as “a staggering array of over 25,000 movie-quality costumes.” There’s no asking price; the Malabars are open to offers.

Once they sell the building and offload the collection, the Malabars plan to retire. Harlequin Costume will continue at a different location, focusing solely on dancewear.

Kate Malabar, the youngest of the couple’s five children, manages the dancewear side of the business.

“The dancewear business is good,” Scott says. “It’s booming.”

“It’s driving the bus right now,” adds Jan, 74. “It’s where everything is happening.”

Harlequin’s main floor houses an extensive inventory that includes more than 15 international dance brands. The store has a shoe-fitting area, complete with a barre for pointe shoe fittings, and pointe shoe specialists who have extensive training and product knowledge.

Outfitting dancers with the items they need to perform is meaningful to Kate.

“Watching a ballerina perform on stage, she needs the shoes and the outfit — it’s part and parcel,” the 39-year-old says. “So I feel like I’m kind of part of it.”

Scott and Jan met each other on Valentine’s Day 1979 and started Harlequin in 1983. But the Malabar family’s history with costumes begins eight decades earlier.

Scott’s great-grandmother, Sara Mallabar, was a single mother to four children when she opened Mallabar’s Theatrical Costumier in Winnipeg in 1904.

The shop sold and rented costumes, dance and formal wear, first to churches and local theatre groups, and eventually to touring theatre groups, pipe bands, and movie and television productions.

It was headquartered in the Hargrave Street building Harlequin now occupies.

Eventually, Mallabar and her family opened branches of the company in Toronto and Montreal — dropping an L from both their surname and the names of the non-Winnipeg locations along the way.

Scott grew up in the Winnipeg store and has childhood memories of filling bottles with spirit gum, an adhesive used to attach costume pieces like wigs, fake beards and moustaches.

In his early adulthood, Scott ran the company with his father until they had a falling out and Scott left the business. He signed a non-compete clause that barred him from starting a costume business of his own for five years. When that time was up, he and Jan started Harlequin on Portage Avenue near Rae and Jerry’s Steak House.

Jan still remembers the first time someone called the store. The customer wanted a two-hump camel costume to wear at a party for a friend who was moving to Saudi Arabia.

The Malabars didn’t have a camel costume — they didn’t have any costumes at that point — but they told the customer the shop had what he was looking for, and set about making a camel outfit.

The Malabars and their employees took that same approach to future requests, which is how Harlequin ended up with the collection it has today.

“If someone phoned and said, ‘Do you have (costumes for) The Sound of Music?’ we said yes,” Jan says. “And then we made it for them and then it became part of our inventory.”

Eventually, Harlequin moved to Hargrave Street. The Malabars added the dancewear department in the 1990s. At the store’s peak, it employed some 25 people.

Harlequin has been a boon to local theatre companies, says Reid Harrison, an actor and musician. He was a founding member of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society of Winnipeg and co-founder of the musical theatre company Dry Cold Productions

“Neither company … would want to be in the position of owning their own costumes and (needing) a place to store them, so having a local rental house like this has been invaluable,” Harrison says.

“In Winnipeg, Harlequin is definitely part of the theatre community. It’s a small theatre community, so it’s nice to have a store like this to fall back on.”

Although Harlequin isn’t selling items individually, there might be an opportunity for buyers to purchase batches of costumes from the collection, says Wes Schollenberg, senior vice-president of Avison Young, who is brokering the sale of the building.

“There’s such a vast array,” Schollenberg says. “They’d be good for museums, theatre companies — all sorts of different things.

About 70 to 80 per cent of the costumes were manufactured by the company. The remainder are vintage items that were sourced from rummage sales or donated to the shop by customers.

Last year, Kate started a vintage store on the building’s second floor. Second Story Vintage aims to give the antique pieces in Harlequin’s collection a new life outside the costume world.

“There’s just so much incredible history of Canadian fashion that we’ve found in our costume inventory,” Kate says.

aaron.epp@freepress.mb.ca