Nestled in between two buildings in Halifax’s south end is a slim, Victorian-style house. Modest in size, this two-story house is painted a distinguished blue, with red trim. It’s located on Barrington Street, across the way from a grocery store.
Displayed in the bay window of this house are various dresses, scarves, jewellery, handbags and other accessories that are handpicked or crafted by Allie Fineberg – a woman of fine taste when it comes to everything fashion.
This is Allie’s Boutique, one of the city’s best-kept secret treasures for women’s garments and – come October – Halloween costumes of all variety.
“Hi there, how are you?” Fineberg welcomes a young man and woman into her store. The woman’s eyes are drawn to a number of handbags carefully displayed on shelves. Allie’s proud collection of handbags are imported from New York City, and she can describe the intricacies of each one.
“Come on in and take a look if you’d like,” Fineberg tells the couple.
She is sitting in one of the back rooms, surrounded by hundreds of handmade Halloween costumes hanging from racks. She’s telling the story of how she came to be in the designer clothing business.
“I guess I kind of fell into this,” she says, as a black cat brushes up against her leg. “My mom used to do part-time modelling and I started working in fashion shows as a child. My grandmother was a seamstress, so I had made my first dress – we’re talking like zipper, puffy sleeves, cuffs – when I was eight. I was pretty young.”
Fineberg, now 53, has been crafting costumes for 45 years. All of the thousands of costumes in her collection are handmade by her, and she’s been accumulating them for the last 15 years.
“Nobody can put in this kind of time and energy and everything else that this takes if they didn’t truly love it. Because you couldn’t pay someone to work the amount of hours it takes to keep this together.
It’s not unusual for me to put in, I don’t know, 60, 70, 80 hours a week,” says Fineberg.
The young woman asks Fineberg about the prices of her handbags.
“Umm, the ones that are in front of my desk are on sale for $10, some of the lighter white ones are $15, and any of the other ones with patterns are $25.”
“They’re just a darling little couple,” she says. “I’ve got a lot of really wonderful customers that I can leave out there, and I don’t have to worry about half the store being gone by the time I get back, which is a nice feeling.”
Fineberg has run her boutique for 23 years. The first 20 of those years were at a different location down the street from where she is now. It began as a second-hand clothing store called Repeat Performance Boutique.
Over the years she’s moved away from the second-hand business and is now focusing more on the new imports as well as her own clothing designs.
But she didn’t always plan to be in the fashion business. When she was younger, she wanted to work in the field of psychology, and she graduated from Dalhousie with degrees in psychology and philosophy.
“How it all started, story of my life, I start everything spontaneously. I never know that I’m going to do something and then all of a sudden one day, I do it.”
It was 1987. She was 30-years-old, pregnant and unemployed. Her husband was off working at sea, and on a whim, she began her career.
“Once you get used to being employed for yourself, it gets really hard to think about being employed for anybody else. Although, it’s kind of a bitch to be the boss, I couldn’t imagine having any other role. I just wouldn’t take orders too well.”
“I love my job, in the same way that I love ice cream I guess. It makes me feel good,” she laughs. “It’s true. I don’t know, I never really grew up I guess. I know I’m a mother and I shouldn’t be admitting this but, there’s definitely a large part of me that’s a very little girl.”
One day, in 2006, like any other day, Fineberg left Repeat Performance Boutique for lunch, and was walking down Barrington Street to buy a sandwich. Instead of going straight, like she normally did, she stopped at an old Victorian-style house. The door was open, and she stepped inside to take a look around. The house was empty, except for the painters that were fixing it up. Fineberg fell in love with it.
“I had no intention of buying a house, none whatsoever,” says Fineberg. “I don’t know what possessed me to walk in. Three years later, I’ve got this store.”
That once empty house is now filled with her life’s work. The four bedrooms upstairs are stacked with her homemade Halloween costumes either hanging from racks or stored in plastic containers.
“To build up that costume collection, I literally worked on that for the last 15 years, and that was an awful lot of sewing and an awful lot of this, that and the next.”
Finding one costume in the mess would seem impossible, but Fineberg swears she knows where each and every one is.
Ask Fineberg for any costume – a ninja turtle, Alice Cooper, Darth Vader, Little Red Riding Hood, a belly dancer, a dominatrix – and chances are, she’s made it and it’s tucked away on a shelf, or hidden upstairs.
“I’d have to say everyone should be able to find something in here. There’s enough different stuff that I really do cater to all age groups and all varieties of people.”
Her costume rentals range in price from $20 to $50.
Fineberg also has plans to put in a cafe in one of the rooms of her boutique.
“I like pouring tea and it’s just something I always wanted, especially where there is so much to look at in this store. Very often I’ve had girls spend an hour or two in here, especially if it’s their first time. It would just be nice to be able to have a place where you could have a cup of tea and sit down and think about all the things you saw out there, then go ahead and make your purchase.”
The young man and woman walk into the backroom where Fineberg is sitting.
“What did you decide on?” Fineberg asks them.
The young woman holds up a white handbag.
“That one? That’s a nice bag,” says Allie. “So that means you would like me to ring you in? Okay.”
Allie stands up and walks over to the cash register. She comes back in and sits down, patting her cat on the head.
“I love my job. It makes me feel good at the end of the day to be able to know, I made people happy.”
Recent Comments