Martin Greenfield - GQ Dec.2009 Pg.126

MARTIN GREENFIELD roamed the rough planked floor of his clothing plant in Brooklyn recently, enjoying the familiar whir of a dozen machines. He paused abruptly to inspect the details of a custom tailored coat spread across a table, fingering a buttonhole. The hand stitching “is a signature for us, one that reads like a thank-you note,” he said.

For years he labored behind the scenes to perfect the set of a sleeve or slant of a pocket for the likes of Bill Clinton, Paul Newman and Michael Bloomberg, whose photos line his office walls. Among his more clandestine assignments was to whip up a suit for Michael Jackson. Mr. Jackson, he recalled, never appeared for a fitting. “It was a kind of undercover operation,” he said. The suit, he added, fit perfectly.

As early as the 1960s, the Czechoslovakian-born Mr. Greenfield was cultivating a reputation as “tailor to the designers,” as he likes to say. Isaac Mizrahi and Donna Karan are among those who sought out his expertise. Ms. Karan, who had approached him in the ’80s to help her with men’s suits, recalled at the time that Mr. Greenfield taught her “discipline — how a quarter-inch adjustment can alter everything about the way a suit fits and feels.”

Today his cutters, sewers and patternmakers piece together blazers and tailored hoodies for adventurous labels like Band of Outsiders and Rag & Bone.

Mr. Greenfield could probably have reeled off the names of famous clients all afternoon. But more pressing things distracted him. “Look at this,” he said, pausing to watch as a worker bent over a buttonhole. “Each stitch has its own knot,” he explained, with mounting satisfaction. “Her job is to pull each knot exactly as tight as the last.” He would have it no other way. Rag & Bone will be available at CANVAS – Spring 10.

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