Bernard Lansky, 1927–2012

In the early 1950s, Bernard Lansky noticed a teenager studying the sharp suits in the window of his Memphis clothing store. “When I get rich, I’m going to buy you out,” the boy said. “Don’t buy me out,” Lansky replied. “Just buy from me.” The kid, Elvis Presley, did just that. After cutting his first record, in 1954, Presley became a regular customer. He bought the plaid sport coat and pegged pants he wore for one of his earliest Ed Sullivan Show appearances at the store, and picked up his first gold lamé jacket there. Lansky even supplied the white suit that Presley was buried in, in 1977. “I put his first suit on him and his last suit on him,” Lansky was fond of saying.

Lansky and his brother Guy launched their first retail business in Memphis in 1946, said the Los Angeles Times. With help from a $125 loan from their father, they bought a women’s consignment shop on Beale Street, in the heart of Memphis’s booming music district; it came cheap, Lansky later revealed, because the previous owner had been killed in a robbery.

The shop became known as “a place where a man with a taste for flash could find the styles Lansky referred to as ‘real sharp,’” said the Associated Press. Johnny Cash went in one day with a can of Prince Albert tobacco, pointed to the picture on the front, and said, “I want this.” Lansky replicated the long black cutaway jacket that became Cash’s hallmark.

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Until the end, musicians visited Lansky Bros. in the hope of hearing stories about Elvis, said Lansky’s granddaughter, Julie. “They all want to shake the hand that shook the hand of the guy who shook the world.”