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 of 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 scrub the garments of Nazi guards on the focus camp. Within the laundry room someday, he by chance 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 methods to sew, he mended the collar, however then determined to maintain the shirt, sliding it below the striped shirt of his jail uniform.
The garment reworked 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 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 stated. 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 residence. 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 unbelievable feat of thriving by doing the other of the remainder of its business.
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 a minimum of 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 anyplace else. It’s now New York Metropolis’s final surviving union clothes manufacturing unit, Tod Greenfield stated in an interview for this obituary in March final 12 months.
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 cloth; to align patterns over swimsuit jacket pockets flawlessly; and to render material stitching invisible.
The traditionalism of the store’s strategies 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 lower about 1,074,000,000 buttonholes.
The previous manufacturing unit turned a congenial setting for political, creative and athletic patriarchs. The acknowledgments part of Mr. Greenfield’s 2014 memoir, “Measure of a Man: From Auschwitz Survivor to Presidents’ Tailor,” enumerates the individuals “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 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 sufficient swimsuit material to make a small tent.” When The New York Submit 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 lodge,” Mr. Greenfield stated 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’ 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 immediately 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 path after Mr. Greenfield agreed to make Nineteen Twenties-style outfits for the HBO collection “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 collection “Billions” (2016-2023); and the flicks “The Nice Gatsby” (2013), “The Wolf of Wall Road” (2013) and “Joker” (2019). The latter featured what is perhaps Greenfield’s most recognizable creation: the crisp crimson 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 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 reside with kin 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 automotive mechanic.
However after sustaining a hand damage that made it tough for him to work, he returned to Pavlovo. Earlier than lengthy, the Nazis pressured 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 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 demise march from Auschwitz, adopted by a freezing prepare switch to Buchenwald, Max was lastly freed within the spring of 1945. Common Eisenhower himself toured the camp, unaware {that a} teenage prisoner there would someday turn into his tailor. In his memoir, Mr. Greenfield recalled pondering that Eisenhower, an bizarre 5-foot-10, was 10 ft tall.
He emigrated to america 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, bought him a job at a clothier referred to 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 number of the main tuxedo-wearers of postwar America. He bought 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 similar time, he discovered himself labeled America’s finest tailor by GQ, Self-importance Truthful 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 subsequent 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 stated to Max, “Should you survive, you reside for us.”
The remainder of Mr. Greenfield’s life was an try to observe that commandment, his son Tod stated: “And that’s what he did.”
