Martin Greenfield, Tailor to Sinatra, Obama, Trump and Shaq, Dies at 95

Defying boundaries of style and time, Martin Greenfield made fits for President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the gangster Meyer Lansky, Leonardo DiCaprio and LeBron James. Males expert within the arts of energy projection — together with style writers and designers — thought-about him the nation’s biggest males’s tailor.

For years, none of them knew the origins of his experience: a beating in Auschwitz.

As a youngster, Mr. Greenfield was Maximilian Grünfeld, a thin Jewish prisoner whose job was to clean the garments of Nazi guards on the focus camp. Within the laundry room sooner or later, he by accident ripped the collar of a guard’s shirt. The person whipped Max in response, then hurled the garment again on the boy.

After a fellow prisoner taught Max learn how to sew, he mended the collar, however then determined to maintain the shirt, sliding it beneath the striped shirt of his jail uniform.

The garment remodeled his life. Different prisoners thought it signified that Max loved particular privileges. Guards allowed him to roam across the grounds of Auschwitz, and when he labored at a hospital kitchen, they assumed that he was approved to take additional meals.

Max ripped one other guard’s uniform. This time, it was deliberate. He was making a clandestine wardrobe that might assist him survive the Holocaust.

“The day I first wore that shirt,” Mr. Greenfield wrote seven a long time later, “was the day I realized garments possess energy.”

He by no means forgot the lesson. “Two ripped Nazi shirts,” he continued, “helped this Jew construct America’s most well-known and profitable custom-suit firm.”

Mr. Greenfield died on Wednesday at a hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., on Lengthy Island, his son Tod mentioned. He was 95.

The miseries and triumphs of Mr. Greenfield’s life exemplified the traditional story of immigration to America. He confronted agony overseas, then penury in his adopted house. With workaholic vitality, he constructed a enterprise and made a reputation for himself, gaining fortune and esteem. Late in life, he lastly reckoned with the tragedies of his youth that he had tried to depart behind.

The fruits of his hopes and efforts was his enterprise, Martin Greenfield Clothiers. It managed the inconceivable feat of thriving by doing the alternative of the remainder of its trade.

Native garment manufacturing had been declining for many years by the late Nineteen Seventies, when Mr. Greenfield arrange store within the East Williamsburg part of Brooklyn, in a four-story constructing that had housed clothiers since at the least 1917. He refused to fabricate abroad and by no means modified his requirements.

In consequence, Greenfield Clothiers was in a position to supply providers that New York’s designers and rich suit-wearers may hardly discover wherever else. It’s now New York Metropolis’s final surviving union clothes manufacturing unit, Tod Greenfield mentioned in an interview for this obituary in March final 12 months.

There, some 50 garment employees, every with a selected experience, put collectively a single go well with over about 10 hours. They function equipment manually, permitting them to customise each press and fold of material; to align patterns over go well with jacket pockets flawlessly; and to render cloth stitching invisible.

The traditionalism of the store’s methods is embodied by a number of century-old buttonhole-cutting machines nonetheless in use. A 12 months in the past this month, a rusted dial on one of many contraptions indicated that it had reduce about 1,074,000,000 buttonholes.

The outdated manufacturing unit turned a congenial setting for political, inventive and athletic patriarchs. The acknowledgments part of Mr. Greenfield’s 2014 memoir, “Measure of a Man: From Auschwitz Survivor to Presidents’ Tailor,” enumerates the folks “we now have had the privilege of working alongside”: Gerald R. Ford, Invoice Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald J. Trump, Joseph R. Biden, Colin Powell, Ed Koch, Michael R. Bloomberg, Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, Martin Scorsese, Denzel Washington, Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant and Carmelo Anthony — amongst many, many others.

A hand-sewn Greenfield go well with turned a low-frequency standing sign most of all in New York Metropolis. The previous police commissioners Raymond Kelly and William J. Bratton have each been Greenfield patrons.

Proximity to energy gave Mr. Greenfield a inventory of quips and anecdotes. Making a go well with for the 7-foot-1 Shaquille O’Neal, he wrote in his memoir, “required sufficient go well with cloth to make a small tent.” When The New York Publish in 2016 requested him about Mr. Lansky’s tastes, Mr. Greenfield recalled that mobster’s orders precisely: 40-short, navy, single-breasted fits.

However he knew when to be discreet. “I met him as soon as on the resort,” Mr. Greenfield mentioned of Mr. Lansky. “He was a really good man to me, and I knew he was in cost. That’s all I’m saying!”

Initially, Greenfield Clothiers’ primary enterprise was manufacturing ready-to-wear fits for malls like Neiman Marcus and for manufacturers like Brooks Brothers and Donna Karan. Mr. Greenfield labored straight with designers, together with Ms. Karan, who confessed to The Occasions that he had taught her garment terminology like “drop,” “gorge” and “button stance.” She added, “His genius is in decoding my imaginative and prescient.”

The enterprise modified route after Mr. Greenfield agreed to make Nineteen Twenties-style outfits for the HBO sequence “Boardwalk Empire” (2010-2014). His store produced greater than 600 fits for 173 characters.

Different movie and TV initiatives adopted, together with for the Showtime sequence “Billions” (2016-2023); and the flicks “The Nice Gatsby” (2013), “The Wolf of Wall Avenue” (2013) and “Joker” (2019). The latter featured what is perhaps Greenfield’s most recognizable creation: the crisp purple go well with and mismatched orange vest worn by Joaquin Phoenix, who performed the title character, the Batman nemesis.

In a testomony to his longevity, Mr. Greenfield dressed the early Twentieth-century comic Eddie Cantor in addition to the actor enjoying him a long time afterward “Boardwalk Empire.”

Maximilian Grünfeld was born on Aug. 9, 1928, within the village of Pavlovo, which was then in Czechoslovakia and is now in western Ukraine. His household was affluent: His father, Joseph, was an industrial engineer; his mom, Tzyvia (Berger) Grünfeld, ran the house.

When Max was about 12, the German Military occupied cities round Pavlovo, and he was despatched to stay with family in Budapest. Sensing he was not wished, he fled the night time he arrived and spent about three years dwelling in a brothel — the ladies there sympathetically took him in — and incomes a dwelling as a junior automotive mechanic.

However after sustaining a hand harm that made it tough for him to work, he returned to Pavlovo. Earlier than lengthy, the Nazis compelled him and his household onto a prepare to Auschwitz. On arrival, he was separated from his mom; his sisters, Rivka and Simcha; and his brother, Sruel Baer. He remained together with his father solely briefly. All of them died within the Holocaust.

He witnessed many horrors. Constructing a brick wall as soon as, he labored alongside one other boy who was randomly used for goal observe and killed.

After a harrowing loss of life march from Auschwitz, adopted by a freezing prepare switch to Buchenwald, Max was lastly freed within the spring of 1945. Basic Eisenhower himself toured the camp, unaware {that a} teenage prisoner there would sooner or later turn out to be his tailor. In his memoir, Mr. Greenfield recalled considering that Eisenhower, an extraordinary 5-foot-10, was 10 ft tall.

He emigrated to the US in 1947, arriving in New York as a refugee with no household, no data of English and $10 in his pocket. Inside weeks, he modified his title to Martin Greenfield — an try and sound “all-American,” he wrote — and a boyhood buddy, additionally a refugee, obtained him a job at a clothier known as GGG in Brooklyn.

He began as a “flooring boy,” ferrying unfinished clothes from one employee to a different. He studied each job within the manufacturing unit: darting, piping, lining, stitching, urgent, hand basting, blind armhole work and ending.

“If the Nazis taught me something, it was {that a} laborer with indispensable expertise is much less more likely to be discarded,” he wrote.

Over time, Mr. Greenfield turned a confidant of GGG’s founder and president, William P. Goldman, who launched him to the agency’s purchasers, together with a few of the main tuxedo-wearers of postwar America. He obtained to pal round with Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.

In 1977, 30 years after he had began, he purchased the manufacturing unit and renamed GGG after himself.

Many years later, he started discussing his expertise of the Holocaust extra extensively, culminating with the publication of his memoir. Across the identical time, he discovered himself labeled America’s finest tailor by GQ, Vanity Fair and CNN.

In recent times he handed off the enterprise to his son Tod and one other son, Jay.

Along with them, Mr. Greenfield is survived by his spouse, Arlene (Bergen) Greenfield, and 4 grandchildren. He lived in North Hills, a Nassau County village on Lengthy Island’s North Shore.

On his first day in Auschwitz, Max’s father, Joseph, advised him that he was extra more likely to survive in the event that they separated, Mr. Greenfield wrote in his memoir. The following day, the camp guards requested which prisoners had expertise. Joseph grabbed Max’s wrist, thrust the boy’s hand within the air and introduced, “A4406” — Max’s tattooed inmate quantity. “He’s a mechanic. Very expert.”

Two German troopers hauled Max away. He didn’t see his father once more.

Earlier than they parted, Joseph mentioned to Max, “For those who survive, you reside for us.”

The remainder of Mr. Greenfield’s life was an try and comply with that commandment, his son Tod mentioned: “And that’s what he did.”