Martin Greenfield, tailor for Sinatra, Obama, Trump and Shaq, dies at 95

Martin Greenfield defied the boundaries of taste and time and made suits for President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the gangster Meyer Lansky, Leonardo DiCaprio and LeBron James. Men skilled in the art of power projection regarded him – along with fashion writers and designers – as the country’s greatest men’s tailor.

For years, none of them knew the origin 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. One day in the laundry room he accidentally tore the collar of a guard’s shirt. The man whipped Max and then threw the garment back at the boy.

After a fellow inmate taught Max to sew, he repaired the collar, but then decided to keep the shirt and slip it under the striped shirt of his prison uniform.

The garment changed his life. Other prisoners thought this meant Max enjoyed special privileges. Guards let him walk around the grounds of Auschwitz, and when he worked in a hospital kitchen, they assumed he had permission to take extra food.

Max tore another guard’s uniform. This time it was intentional. He created a clandestine wardrobe that would help him survive the Holocaust.

“The day I first wore that shirt,” Mr. Greenfield said wrote seventy years later “was the day I learned that clothes have power.”

He never forgot the lesson. “Two torn Nazi shirts,” he continued, “helped with this Jew building America’s most famous and successful customization company.”

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

The woes and triumphs of Mr. Greenfield’s life exemplified the classic story of immigration to America. He faced pain abroad and then poverty in his adopted home. With workaholic energy, he built a business, made a name for himself and acquired fortune and prestige. Late in life, he finally came to terms with the childhood tragedies he had tried to put behind him.

The culmination of his hopes and efforts was his company, Martin Greenfield Clothiers. It managed the unlikely feat of success by doing the opposite of the rest of its industry.

There was local clothing production decreasing That had been the case for decades by the late 1970s, when Mr. Greenfield set up shop in Brooklyn’s East Williamsburg neighborhood, in a four-story building that had housed clothing stores since 1917. He refused to produce abroad and never changed his standards.

As a result, Greenfield Clothiers was able to offer services that New York designers and wealthy suit wearers could hardly find elsewhere. It is now the last remaining unionized garment factory in New York City, Tod Greenfield said in an interview for this obituary last March.

There, about fifty garment workers, each with a specific expertise, put together one suit in about ten hours. They operate the machines manually, allowing them to adjust every press and fold of the fabric; to align patterns flawlessly on jacket pockets; and to make fabric stitches invisible.

The traditionalism of the shop’s techniques is epitomized by several centuries-old buttonhole cutting machines still in use today. A year ago this month, a rusted dial on one of the structures indicated that it contained approximately 1,074,000,000 buttonholes.

The old factory became a sympathetic 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,” lists the people “with whom we have had the privilege of working”: Gerald R. Ford , Bill 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 – in addition many, many others.

A hand-sewn Greenfield suit became a low-frequency status signal, especially in New York City. Former Police Commissioners Raymond Kelly and William J. Bratton were both patrons of Greenfield.

The proximity to power provided Mr. Greenfield with a supply of jokes and anecdotes. Making a suit for the seven-foot-tall Shaquille O’Neal, he wrote in his memoirs, “requires enough suit fabric to make a small tent.” When asked by The New York Post in 2016 about Mr. Lansky’s tastes, Mr. Greenfield said remembered exactly that gangster’s orders: 40 short, navy blue, single-breasted suits.

But he knew when to be discreet. “I met him at the hotel once,” Mr. Greenfield said of Mr. Lansky. “He was a very nice man to me and I knew he was in charge. That’s all I’m saying!”

Initially, Greenfield Clothiers’ main activity was manufacturing ready-to-wear clothing for department stores such as Neiman Marcus and for brands such as Brooks Brothers and Donna Karan. Mr. Greenfield worked directly with designers, including Ms. Karan, who admitted to The Times that he had taught her clothing terminology such as “drop,” “gorge” and “button stance.” She added: ‘His genius lies in interpreting my vision.’

The company changed direction after Mr. Greenfield agreed to create 1920s-style outfits for the HBO series “Boardwalk Empire” (2010-2014). His shop produced more than 600 suits for 173 characters.

Other film and TV projects followed, including the Showtime series “Billions” (2016-2023); and the films “The Great Gatsby” (2013), “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013) and “Joker” (2019). The latter featured perhaps Greenfield’s most recognizable creation: the crisp red suit and mismatched orange vest worn by Joaquin Phoenix, who played the title character, Batman’s enemy.

As a testament to his longevity, Mr. Greenfield dressed early 20th-century comedian Eddie Cantor, as well as the actor who played him decades later in “Boardwalk Empire.”

Maximilian Grünfeld was born on August 9, 1928 in the village of Pavlovo, which was then in Czechoslovakia and is now in western Ukraine. His family was wealthy: his father, Joseph, was an industrial engineer; his mother, Tzyvia (Berger) Grünfeld, managed the house.

When Max was about twelve, the German army occupied towns around Pavlovo and he was sent to live with relatives in Budapest. Feeling that he was not wanted, he fled the night he arrived and spent about three years in a brothel – the women there took him sympathetically – earning a living as a junior car mechanic.

But after suffering a hand injury that made it difficult for him to work, he returned to Pavlovo. It wasn’t long before the Nazis forced him and his family onto a train to Auschwitz. Upon arrival he was separated from his mother; his sisters, Rivka and Simcha; and his brother, Sruel Baer. He only stayed with his father for a short time. They all died during the Holocaust.

He witnessed many horrors. He once built a brick wall and worked with another boy who was randomly used for target practice and murdered.

After a harrowing death march from Auschwitz, followed by an icy train journey to Buchenwald, Max was finally released in the spring of 1945. General Eisenhower himself toured the camp, unaware that a teenage inmate there would one day become his tailor. In his memoirs, Mr. Greenfield recalled thinking that Eisenhower, an ordinary 6-foot-1, was 10 feet tall.

He emigrated to the United States in 1947 and arrived in New York as a refugee with no family, no knowledge of English and $10 in his pocket. Within weeks, he changed his name to Martin Greenfield — an attempt to sound “all-American,” he wrote — and a childhood friend, also a refugee, got him a job at a clothing manufacturer called GGG in Brooklyn.

He started out as a “floor boy,” delivering unfinished garments from one worker to another. He studied every job in the factory: pleating, piping, lining, stitching, pressing, hand basting, blind armhole work and finishing.

“If the Nazis taught me anything, it’s that a worker with indispensable skills is less likely to be thrown away,” he wrote.

Over time, Mr. Greenfield became a confidant of GGG’s founder and president, William P. Goldman, who introduced him to the company’s clients, including some of postwar America’s leading tuxedo wearers. He could hang out with Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.

In 1977, thirty years after he started, he bought the factory and renamed it GGG after himself.

Decades later, he began to discuss his experiences with the Holocaust more broadly, culminating in the publication of his memoirs. Around the same time, he was labeled America’s best tailor GQ, Vanity fair And CNN.

In recent years he turned the business over 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 village in Nassau County on the north shore of Long Island.

On his first day in Auschwitz, Max’s father, Joseph, told him he was more likely to survive if they separated, Mr. Greenfield wrote in his memoir. The next day the camp guards asked which prisoners had skills. Grabbing Max by the wrist, Joseph raised the boy’s hand in the air and announced, “A4406”: Max’s tattooed prisoner number. “He’s a mechanic. Very talented.”

Two German soldiers dragged Max away. He no longer saw his father.

Before they parted, Joseph told Max, “If you survive, you live for us.”

The rest of Mr. Greenfield’s life was an attempt to follow that commandment, his son Tod said, “And that’s what he did.”