Defying the boundaries of taste and time, Martin Greenfield made suits for President Dwight Eisenhower, gangster Meyer Lansky, Leonardo DiCaprio and LeBron James. Men skilled in the arts of power projection—along with writers and fashion designers—considered him the nation’s greatest men’s tailor.
For years, none of them knew the origin of their expertise: a beating in Auschwitz.
As a teenager, Mr. Greenfield was Maximilian Grünfeld, a skinny Jewish prisoner whose job it was to wash the clothes of Nazi concentration camp guards. In the laundry room one day, he accidentally tore the collar of a guard’s shirt. The man whipped Max in response and then tossed the garment back at the boy.
After a fellow inmate taught Max how to sew, he made the collar, but then decided to keep the shirt, tucking it under the striped shirt of his prison uniform.
The garment changed his life. Other inmates took it to mean that Max enjoyed special privileges. The guards allowed him to roam the Auschwitz grounds, and when he worked in a hospital kitchen, they assumed he was authorized to take extra food.
Max tore off 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 wrote seven decades later, “was the day I learned that clothes have power.”
He never forgot the lesson. “Two torn Nazi shirts,” he continued, “helped with that Jew created America’s most famous and successful custom suit company.”
Mr. Greenfield died Wednesday at a hospital in Manhasset, New York, on Long Island, his son Todd said. It was 95.
The tribulations and triumphs of Mr. Greenfield’s life exemplified the classic story of immigration to America. He faced distress abroad and then bankruptcy 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 tried to put behind him.
The culmination of his hopes and efforts was his business, Martin Greenfield Clothiers. She accomplished the improbable feat of acne by doing the opposite of the rest of her industry.
Local clothing production had been in decline for decades in the late 1970s, when Mr. Greenfield set up shop in the East Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, in a four-story building that had housed clothing since at least 1917. He refused to manufacture overseas and never changed the his standard.
As a result, Greenfield Clothiers was able to offer services that New York designers and wealthy suit wearers could hardly find anywhere else. It is now New York’s last surviving union garment factory, Todd Greenfield said in an interview for this obituary in March of last year.
There, about 50 garment workers, each with a special expertise, made a suit in about 10 hours. They operate the machines manually, allowing them to adjust every pressure and fold of the fabric. to perfectly line up the designs above the jacket pockets. and make the fabric seam invisible.
The traditional character of the shop’s techniques is embodied by several centuries-old buttonhole cutting machines still in use. A year ago this month, a rusty dial on one of the machines showed that it had cut about 1,074,000,000 buttonholes.
The old factory became a pleasant setting for political, artistic and sports patriarchs. The acknowledgments section of Mr. Greenfield’s 2014 memoir, “A Man’s Measure: From Auschwitz Survivor to President’s Tailor,” lists the people “we were privileged to work with”: 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 — among many, many others.
A handmade Greenfield suit became a low-frequency status symbol above all else in New York. Former police commissioners Raymond Kelly and William J. Bratton were both Greenfield patrons.
Proximity to power has given Mr. Greenfield a store of quips and jokes. Making a suit for the 1-foot-long Shaquille O’Neal, he wrote in his memoirs, “needed enough suit fabric to make a small tent.” When the New York Post in 2016 asked him about Mr. Lansky’s tastes, Mr. Greenfield recalled the mobster’s orders precisely: 40 short, navy, one-piece suits.
But he knew when to be discreet. ”I met him once at the hotel,” Mr. Greenfield said of Mr. Lansky. “He was a really good guy for me and I knew he was in charge. That’s all I’m saying!”
Initially, Greenfield Clothiers’ main business was making ready-to-wear 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 confessed to the Times that he had taught her clothing jargon such as “fall,” “canyon” and “button stance.” He added: “His genius lies in his interpretation of my vision.”
The business changed direction after Mr. Greenfield agreed to make 1920s-style clothing for the HBO series “Boardwalk Empire” (2010-2014). His shop produced more than 600 costumes for 173 characters.
Other film and television 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 what might be Greenfield’s most recognizable creation: the crisp red suit and mismatched orange vest worn by Joaquin Phoenix, who played the titular character, the Batman Nemesis.
In a testament to his longevity, Mr. Greenfield dressed the 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 prosperous: His father, Joseph, was an industrial engineer. His mother, Tzyvia (Berger) Grünfeld, ran the house.
When Max was about 12, the German army occupied towns around Pavlovo and he was sent to live with relatives in Budapest. Feeling that he was not wanted, he left the night he arrived and spent about three years living in a brothel—the women there took him in sympathetically—and earning a living as a junior auto mechanic.
But after suffering an arm injury that made it difficult for him to work, he returned to Pavlovo. Before long, 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 stayed with his father only for a short time. All of them died in the Holocaust.
He witnessed many horrors. Building a brick wall once, he worked alongside another boy who happened to be used for target practice and was killed.
After a painful death march from Auschwitz, followed by a freezing train transfer to Buchenwald, Max was finally released in the spring of 1945. General Eisenhower himself toured the camp, unaware that a teenage prisoner there would become a tailor’s day. In his memoirs, Mr. Greenfield recalled thinking that Eisenhower, an ordinary 10.5 feet, was 10 feet tall.
He immigrated to the United States in 1947, arriving 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 store called GGG in Brooklyn.
He started out as a “floor boy”, passing unfinished garments from one worker to another. He studied every job in the factory: darts, piping, lining, stitching, pressing, hand throwing, blind armhole and finishing.
“If the Nazis taught me anything, it was that a worker with necessary skills is less likely to be rejected,” he wrote.
Over time, Mr. Greenfield became a confidant of GGG’s founder and chairman, William P. Goldman, who introduced him to the firm’s clients, including some of the leading tuxedos of postwar America. He got to hang out with Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.
In 1977, 30 years after he had started, he bought the factory and renamed it GGG after himself.
Decades later, he began to discuss his Holocaust experience more widely, culminating in the publication of his memoirs. Around the same time, he found himself being named America’s Best Tailor by GQ, Vanity Fair and CNN.
In recent years he handed 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 Nassau County village on the north shore of Long Island.
On his first day at Auschwitz, Max’s father, Joseph, told him he was more likely to survive if they were separated, Mr. Greenfield wrote in his memoir. The next day, the camp guards asked which prisoners had abilities. Joseph grabbed Max’s wrist, shoved the boy’s hand in the air and announced, “A4406” — Max’s tattooed prisoner number. “He’s an engineer. Very skilled.”
Two German soldiers led Max away. He never saw his father again.
Before they parted, Joseph told Max, “If you survive, you live for us.”
The rest of Mr. Greenfield’s life was an effort to follow that command, his son Todd said: “And that’s what he did.”
