Georges de Paris, a Washington tailor who hand-stitched suits for every American president from Lyndon B. Johnson through Barack Obama (and who may have embroidered his own profile), died on Sept. 13 in Arlington, Va. He was 80.

The cause was cancer, according to the Hospice Center there.

Mr. de Paris’s most consistent account of his life was that he arrived in America around 1960 and transformed himself from Georgios Christopoulos, a jobless and homeless vagrant robbed of his life savings by a jilted girlfriend, into a flourishing suit maker with a Francophile’s nom de needle, opening his own shop at 14th and G Streets, less than three blocks from the White House.

In 1963, a satisfied customer, Representative Otto E. Passman, a Louisiana Democrat, introduced him to Lyndon B. Johnson, and Mr. de Paris was on his way to outfitting nine presidents.

“Betty was very happy that I began using him as my tailor,” Gerald R. Ford told The New Yorker magazine in 2004, referring to Mr. Ford’s wife.