Will This Holocaust Survivor, Tailor to Presidents, Dress Trump?
Martin Greenfield has been a tailor to the presidents, from Dwight Eisenhower to Barack Obama. As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office on Friday, it’s unclear if the new leader will get some threads from the 88-year-old Holocaust survivor.
“We made some suits for him right before he decided to run, but we haven’t made any since he began the campaign. We’d be honored if he asked us to make him some more suits,” said Martin Greenfield’s son Jay Greenfield, vice president of Martin Greenfield Clothiers, in comments to the The Times of Israel. “We make clothing for people. We don’t care about political affiliation. We are pleased to make people look good on both sides of the aisle.”
Martin Greenfield, who’s reported to still work six days a week, is originally from Czechoslovakia, and he lost his entire family at Auschwitz-Buchenwald.
He moved to New York City after the war, rising through the ranks of Brooklyn’s GGG clothing brand, which he eventually bought and renamed. The first president he sewed for, Eisenhower, oversaw the army that liberated him from Buchenwald.
Jay Greenfield said that he works with leaders and often encourages them to make slight changes to their looks, but that such recommendations had limits. “It is always an honor to dress the president,” he said about Trump. But, he continued, “I wouldn’t move him into a hipster look. That would be inappropriate.”
Greenfield suits aren’t cheap, running up to several thousands dollars each. But as a billionaire, Trump should have no problem coughing up the money.
Contact Daniel J. Solomon at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO