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 vogue 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 at some point, 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 the right way to sew, he mended the collar, however then determined to maintain the shirt, sliding it underneath 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 may assist him survive the Holocaust.
“The day I first wore that shirt,” Mr. Greenfield wrote seven a long time later, “was the day I learned clothes possess power.”
He by no means 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 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 basic 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 go away behind.
The fruits of his hopes and efforts was his enterprise, Martin Greenfield Clothiers. It managed the unbelievable feat of thriving by doing the alternative of the remainder of its business.
Native garment manufacturing had been declining for many years by the late 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 very least 1917. He refused to fabricate abroad and by no means modified his requirements.
Because of this, Greenfield Clothiers was capable of provide companies 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 facility, Tod Greenfield mentioned in an interview for this obituary in March final yr.
There, some 50 garment employees, every with a specific experience, put collectively a single swimsuit over about 10 hours. They function equipment manually, permitting them to customise each press and fold of material; to align patterns over swimsuit jacket pockets flawlessly; and to render cloth stitching invisible.
The traditionalism of the store’s strategies is embodied by a number of century-old buttonhole-cutting machines nonetheless in use. A yr 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 facility 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 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 swimsuit 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 swimsuit 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 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 once at the hotel,” Mr. Greenfield mentioned of Mr. 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’ fundamental enterprise was manufacturing ready-to-wear fits for shops 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 Instances that he had taught her garment terminology like “drop,” “gorge” and “button stance.” She added, “His genius is in interpreting my vision.”
The enterprise modified route after Mr. Greenfield agreed to make 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 films “The Great Gatsby” (2013), “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013) and “Joker” (2019). The latter featured what may be Greenfield’s most recognizable creation: the crisp purple swimsuit 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 in a while “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 needed, he fled the evening he arrived and spent about three years residing in a brothel — the ladies there sympathetically took him in — and incomes a residing as a junior automobile mechanic.
However after sustaining a hand harm that made it tough for him to work, he returned to Pavlovo. Earlier than lengthy, the Nazis pressured him and his household onto a practice to Auschwitz. On arrival, he was separated from his mom; his sisters, Rivka and Simcha; and his brother, Sruel Baer. He remained along 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 apply and killed.
After a harrowing dying march from Auschwitz, adopted by a freezing practice 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 at some point turn into his tailor. In his memoir, Mr. Greenfield recalled pondering that Eisenhower, an strange 5-foot-10, was 10 toes 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 to sound “all-American,” he wrote — and a boyhood good friend, additionally a refugee, obtained him a job at a clothier referred to as GGG in Brooklyn.
He began as a “floor boy,” ferrying unfinished clothes from one employee to a different. He studied each job within the manufacturing facility: darting, piping, lining, stitching, urgent, hand basting, blind armhole work and ending.
“If the Nazis taught me anything, it was that a laborer with indispensable skills is less 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 among 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 facility and renamed GGG after himself.
A long time later, he started discussing his expertise of the Holocaust extra broadly, 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.
Lately 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, informed 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 abilities. Joseph grabbed Max’s wrist, thrust the boy’s hand within the air and introduced, “A4406” — Max’s tattooed inmate quantity. “He is a mechanic. Very skilled.”
Two German troopers hauled Max away. He didn’t see his father once more.
Earlier than they parted, Joseph mentioned to Max, “If you survive, you live for us.”
The remainder of Mr. Greenfield’s life was an try to observe that commandment, his son Tod mentioned: “And that’s what he did.”
