In the early 1950s, a man named Bernard Lansky kept noticing the same skinny teenager outside his shop window on Beale Street in Memphis. The boy never came in. He just stood on the pavement and stared at the clothes. Lansky’s shop sold loud, flashy menswear — pink and black shirts, pegged trousers, two-tone shoes — the kind of thing no respectable young man wore. The boy could not afford a single item in the window. His name was Elvis Presley, and he was 17.
Lansky did the thing that changed both their lives. He invited him in.
There is an exchange between them from those early days that is now carved onto a historical marker on Beale Street. Elvis, standing in a shop full of clothes he could not buy, told Lansky that one day he would come back and buy him out — purchase the entire store. Lansky’s reply was quicker and better: “Elvis, don’t buy me out. Buy from me.”
He did for the next twenty-five years.
Lansky Bros. “Clothier to the King” The Shop Behind Elvis’ Fashion
It is worth understanding what Lansky’s shop actually was. He and his brother Guy had opened it in 1946 with a $125 loan from their father. They started out selling army surplus, and when that dried up they switched to high-fashion menswear — the sort of bold, colorful clothing that other Memphis shopkeepers openly laughed at. Beale Street was the heart of Black Memphis, and its music scene, and Lansky’s became the place performers went to look sharp. B.B. King shopped there. So did Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins.
So when people talk about where Elvis got his look — the pink and black, the collars, the flash that made him seem like he had arrived from another planet — the answer is a shop on Beale Street run by two brothers, selling clothes to Black musicians that white America thought were ridiculous.
The man who dressed Elvis – Bernard Lansky
Once the money arrived, Lansky dressed him for everything that mattered. He dressed him for the Louisiana Hayride, the radio show that first made him famous. He dressed him for his television appearances on the Tommy Dorsey show. And he dressed him for The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 — the night 60 million Americans watched and the world changed.
Then, in August 1977, the phone rang. Lansky’s son Hal described what happened: “We were just devastated. We took the next plane out to Memphis.” And when they arrived, Bernard Lansky was asked to do one last job for his customer of twenty-five years.
He chose the suit Elvis Presley was buried in: a white suit and a blue tie. Hal remembered seeing him in the casket and simply not being able to believe what he was looking at.
For the rest of his life, Bernard Lansky told that story to anybody who came into his shop, and he always finished it the same way. It is the reason people still make a pilgrimage to Lansky’s when they visit Memphis. “I put his first suit on him, and I put him in his last.”
Lansky died in 2012, aged 85. The shop is still open, now run by his son and granddaughter, and fans still walk in from all over the world. The first thing they do when they get to Memphis, he used to say, is come down to Lansky’s.