Martin Greenfield, a tailor who dressed six US presidents, countless A-list actors and professional athletes, died on March 20 at the age of 95, according to his sons Jay, Tod and David Greenfield.
Dubbed by GQ and other media outlets as “America’s greatest living tailor,” Greenfield founded the longstanding menswear shop Martin Greenfield Clothiers in Brooklyn in 1977 after 30 years of working in a clothing factory.
For decades, his custom, handcrafted suits were sported by heavyweights of American culture: Frank Sinatra, Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio and LeBron James, to name a few. Greenfield also outfitted six US Presidents.
“My craft is very difficult to define because it’s many things,” he explained in a 2016 video interview with Great Big Story. “I am a maker of clothing. I know how to measure. I know how to fit people. Very few people could match me.”
Greenfield was born Maximilian Grünfeld in 1928 in the village of Pavlovo, then Czechoslovakia and now part of Ukraine. In 1944, Nazis forced him and his family from their home and onto a train to Auschwitz, where he was separated from his parents and siblings and incarcerated for more than a year. Of his entire family — his mother, father, two sisters and brother — Greenfield was the only one to survive.
The notorious concentration camp was where Greenfield picked up the skills that would later define his career.
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While assigned to wash Nazi uniforms, he accidentally tore a soldier’s shirt — and was brutally beaten for it, he wrote in his memoir “Measure of a Man: From Auschwitz Survivor to Presidents’ Tailor.” He kept the shirt, and a fellow prisoner taught him how to sew up the collar. He later decided to wear the mended garment under his prison uniform; people seemed to respect him for it, he recalled. He felt so empowered in the shirt, he wrote, that he risked ripping a second one so he could have two.
“Strangely enough, two ripped Nazi shirts helped this Jew build America’s most famous and successful custom-suit company,” Greenfield continued in his memoir. “God has a wonderful sense of humor.”
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