Martin Greenfield—Holocaust Survivor, Tailor to Six U.S. Presidents, and Fashion Legend—Dies at 95

Martin Greenfield, a Jewish American who survived the horrors of the Holocaust by learning how to sew, died in Long Island, New York, on Wednesday at the age of 95. Greenfield became known by his powerful clients as the greatest men’s tailor in the United States.

Before becoming the tailor to American presidents and legends like Frank Sinatra and Al Pacino — to name just a few — and making the suits for director Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 remake of The Great Gatsby, Greenfield grew up in Czechoslovakia.

In April 1944, at the age of 15, Greenfield was taken by the Nazis to Auschwitz, the sprawling concentration and extermination camp in occupied Poland where ultimately 1.1 million people were killed. He never saw his family again.

Greenfield, in a 2014 interview with Breitbart News’s Wynton Hall about his memoir Measure of Man: From Auschwitz Survivor to Presidents’ Tailor, detailed how he learned to sew while at Auschwitz:

One of my first jobs at Auschwitz was in the laundry scrubbing Nazi uniforms. I scrubbed one so hard I ripped it. After the soldier beat me, I took the shirt and a nice prisoner taught me how to sew and repair it. I then put the Nazi shirt on under my striped prisoner uniform. Why, I don’t know. But I did.

And then I noticed the guards treated me a little better. “The shirt means something,” I thought. And that’s when I first learned clothes possess power.

In 1947, Greenfield immigrated to America and would build the greatest menswear tailoring business in the industry. Greenfield’s tailoring business, Martin Greenfield Clothiers in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, thrived even as the nation’s garment districts suffered rapid decline throughout the 1970s and 80s as a result of free trade and companies offshoring production.

Martin Greenfield Clothiers was born out of a quintessential American story. After immigrating to the United States, Greenfield began working at GGG Clothes, a suit factory. After working there for 30 years and learning to do most of the work in making a suit, the factory’s owners decided to close up in the mid-1970s.

Watching as his coworkers were laid off, Greenfield had other plans for the factory. He soon bought the factory and reopened it under his name.

Never bowing to trends, Greenfield refused to offshore production and stuck with the traditional art of men’s tailoring — both of which have kept the nation’s most powerful and influential men clamoring for custom suits at his shop to this day.

His son, Tod Greenfield, told the New York Times that Martin Greenfield Clothiers is the only unionized garment factory that remains in New York City. It employs about 50 employees, all with specialized skills in helping cut, sew, and piece together custom suits for clients.

Greenfield counted Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden as some of his high-profile clients. His menswear has been forever forged into American culture through film and celebrities.

“Basically anytime you’ve watched a movie, you’ve seen a Martin Greenfield suit,” Wynton Hall said in 2015 during a press event. Those movies include 1992’s Scent of a Woman, 1987’s Wall Street, 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street, and 2019’s The Joker, among many others.

Greenfield, even in his fame, gave the credit for all his success to his “forever hero” Eisenhower, the United States, and America’s armed forces that helped free him from Nazi oppression.

“Everything I am or will ever be I owe to God and the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines of the US Armed Forces who fought and died to liberate me,” Greenfield wrote in 2014.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.