Martin Greenfield, presidential tailor, 95
Defying boundaries of taste and time, Martin Greenfield made suits for Dwight Eisenhower, gangster Meyer Lansky, Leonardo DiCaprio, and LeBron James. Men skilled in the arts of power projection — along with fashion writers and designers — considered him the nation’s greatest men’s tailor.
For years, none of them knew the origins of his expertise: a beating in Auschwitz.
As a teenager, Mr. Greenfield was Maximilian Grünfeld, a skinny Jewish prisoner whose job was to wash the clothes of Nazi guards at the concentration camp. In the laundry room one day, he accidentally ripped the collar of a guard’s shirt. The man whipped Max in response, then hurled the garment back at the boy.
After a fellow prisoner taught Max how to sew, he mended the collar, but then decided to keep the shirt, sliding it under the striped shirt of his prison uniform.
The garment transformed his life. Other prisoners thought it signified that Max enjoyed special privileges. Guards allowed him to roam around the grounds of Auschwitz, and when he worked at a hospital kitchen, they assumed that he was authorized to take extra food.
Max ripped another guard’s uniform. This time, it was deliberate. He was creating a clandestine wardrobe that would help him survive the Holocaust.
“The day I first wore that shirt,” Mr. Greenfield wrote seven decades later, “was the day I learned clothes possess power.”
He never forgot the lesson. “Two ripped Nazi shirts,” he continued, “helped this Jew build America's most famous and successful custom-suit company.”
Mr. Greenfield died Wednesday at a hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., on Long Island, his son Tod said. He was 95.
The miseries and triumphs of Mr. Greenfield’s life exemplified the classic tale of immigration to America. He faced agony abroad, then penury in his adopted home. With workaholic energy, he built a business and made a name for himself, gaining fortune and esteem. Late in life, he finally reckoned with the tragedies of his youth that he had tried to leave behind.
The culmination of his hopes and efforts was his business, Martin Greenfield Clothiers. It managed the improbable feat of thriving by doing the opposite of the rest of its industry.
Local garment manufacturing had been declining for decades by the late 1970s, when Mr. Greenfield set up shop in the East Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, in a four-story building that had housed clothiers since at least 1917. He refused to manufacture overseas and never changed his standards.
As a result, Greenfield Clothiers was able to offer services that New York’s designers and wealthy suit-wearers could hardly find anywhere else. It is now New York City’s last surviving union clothing factory, Tod Greenfield said in an interview for this obituary in March 2023.
There, some 50 garment workers, each with a particular expertise, put together a single suit over about 10 hours. They operate machinery manually, allowing them to customize every press and fold of fabric; to align patterns over suit jacket pockets flawlessly; and to render fabric stitching invisible.
The traditionalism of the shop’s techniques is embodied by several century-old buttonhole-cutting machines still in use. A year ago this month, a rusted dial on one of the contraptions indicated that it had cut about 1,074,000,000 buttonholes.
The old factory became a congenial setting for political, artistic, and athletic patriarchs. The acknowledgments section of Mr. Greenfield’s 2014 memoir, “Measure of a Man: From Auschwitz Survivor to Presidents’ Tailor,” enumerates the people “we have had the privilege of working alongside”: Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Colin Powell, Ed Koch, Michael Bloomberg, Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, Martin Scorsese, Denzel Washington, Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant, and Carmelo Anthony — among many, many others.
A hand-sewn Greenfield suit became a low-frequency status signal most of all in New York City. Former Police Commissioners Raymond Kelly and William Bratton have both been Greenfield patrons.
Proximity to power gave Mr. Greenfield a stock of quips and anecdotes. Making a suit for the 7-foot-1 Shaquille O’Neal, he wrote in his memoir, “required enough suit fabric to make a small tent.” When The New York Post in 2016 asked him about Lansky’s tastes, Mr. Greenfield recalled that mobster’s orders exactly: 40-short, navy, singlebreasted suits.
But he knew when to be discreet. “I met him once at the hotel,” Mr. Greenfield said of Lansky. “He was a very nice guy to me, and I knew he was in charge. That’s all I’m saying!”
Initially, Greenfield Clothiers’ main business was manufacturing ready-to-wear suits for department stores like Neiman Marcus and for brands like Brooks Brothers and Donna Karan. Mr. Greenfield worked directly with designers, including Karan, who confessed to the Times that he had taught her garment terminology like “drop,” “gorge,” and “button stance.” She added, “His genius is in interpreting my vision.”
The business changed direction after Mr. Greenfield agreed to make 1920s-style outfits for the HBO series “Boardwalk Empire” (2010-14). His shop produced more than 600 suits for 173 characters.
Other film and TV projects followed, including for the Showtime series “Billions” (2016-23); and the movies “The Great Gatsby” (2013), “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013), and “Joker” (2019). The latter featured what might be Mr. Greenfield’s most recognizable creation: the crisp red suit and mismatched orange vest worn by Joaquin Phoenix, who played the title character, the Batman nemesis.
In a testament to his longevity, Mr. Greenfield dressed early 20th-century comedian Eddie Cantor, as well as the actor playing him decades later on “Boardwalk Empire.”
In recent years, he handed off the business to his son, Tod, and another son, Jay.
In addition to them, Mr. Greenfield is survived by his wife, Arlene (Bergen) Greenfield, and four grandchildren. He lived in North Hills, a Nassau County village on Long Island’s North Shore.