A century-old sewing shop reopens as a living exhibit of Montreal’s garment past

For 100 years, H. Fisher & Fils sold sewing supplies to everyone, from Cirque du Soleil to fashion school students pulling all-nighters. Its last owner, Esther Fisher, ran the place like a neighbourhood secret with odd hours and no online presence, only high-quality notions, humour, and a memory like a filing cabinet.

“She was a real force of nature,” says Zev Moses, director and founder of the Museum of Jewish Montreal. “She stayed meaningful to her community and customers for so long.”

Now, thanks to the museum, that time capsule is open to the public. H. Fisher has been revived as a living museum exhibit, complete with guided tours, community storytelling, and rotating art installations in the storefront window. It’s part preservation project, part oral history lab, and part love letter to a Montreal that’s vanishing too fast to archive.

"When you walk in, it doesn’t feel like a recreated historical set. It feels like she had just stepped out to grab lunch," Zev says.

An unconventional museum for a Montreal story

“We’ve never been a traditional museum,” Moses says. “The city is really our museum—we just look at it through a Jewish lens.”

For the founder and director, the reopening of H. Fisher is about making space to feel what it was like to live and work in Montreal’s old garment district—a stretch of Saint-Laurent that once thumped with sewing machines and cutting tables, where immigrant families lived upstairs and worked downstairs.

“This is a Jewish story, yes,” Moses explains, “but it’s also a Montreal story. The garment industry was one of the largest industries in the city for over a century. It touched French-Canadian workers, Italian immigrants, Portuguese families. The Fisher space could’ve belonged to any of them. But the fact that it was preserved like this? That’s what’s rare.”

“It was either this—or lose the last one.”

Founded in 1922 by Harry Fisher, an Eastern European Jewish immigrant, H. Fisher & Fils remained in the family for generations. Esther, its final steward, ran it from the early ’90s until 2022, maintaining relationships with clients across Canada—opera companies, large factories, and fledgling designers alike. She had a soft spot for fashion students from LaSalle and other colleges, who knew the shop as the place to get the right zipper or button at the right price.

“She had this duality,” says Moses. “Big institutions trusted her, but so did small creators. That range is what made the shop such a hub. It wasn’t just transactional. It was social. It was personal.”

Moses had known about Esther and the store for years. “Even 15 years ago, when I was starting the museum, it was clear there were very few vestiges of Jewish commercial life left in the old neighbourhood,” he says. “Esther was still there. I knew it was special then.”

When Esther passed away, her family prepared to sell the space. That’s when Moses and the museum stepped in. “It was either this—or lose the last one,” he says.

The space has barely been touched. There are invoices from the 1980s in filing cabinets, swatches pinned to corkboards, half-used rolls of ribbon on the walls. “We don’t even know what everything is yet,” Moses says. “We’re building the plane as we fly it.”

“It’s about having a conversation through art with the store and its story."

The lifeblood of a living exhibit

Part of the project’s appeal is its openness to evolution. Visitors are encouraged not just to look, but to contribute. The museum is collecting stories from anyone who interacted with the shop, worked in the garment industry, or has something to say about this corner of the Main.

“This isn’t a polished, finished exhibit,” Moses says. “Right now, it takes maybe 30 minutes to visit. But you might come in and give us a story, a contact, a clue. You might be the reason it changes. And if you come back next year, it might be completely different—more layered, more nuanced.”

To keep the space alive and in dialogue with the present, the museum is also programming contemporary art in the front display window. The opening installation features work by local and international artists whose practices intersect with the exhibit’s themes—textiles, memory, migration.

“We don’t even know what everything is yet,” Moses says. “We’re building the plane as we fly it.”

“It’s about having a conversation through art with the store and its story,” Moses says.

It’s easy to romanticize a place like H. Fisher. But what makes this project sing is how grounded it is in people, not just preservation. Esther Fisher wasn’t running a nostalgia shop—she was running a business. A practical one. The kind Montreal used to have on every block before everything became a smoothie bar with a typewriter in the window.