NYC’s newest retro barbershops offer much more than 1950’s chairs. The return of the old school barbershop has caught on in America’s coolest city. Some of the fuel behind the trend could be the hit cable series “Mad Men” but it appears to be more than that. How else can you explain barbershop chairs with built in ashtrays, beer and full bars! Now that’s “Old School.”

The New York Post recently ran a story about the new, old barbershops. From the article:

Threatened with extinction in the late ’60s and ’70s by men growing lengthy locks and bushy beards and in the ’80s by the rise of unisex bargain salons (Supercuts, anyone?), old-school barbershops are making a comeback.

“It’s definitely a trend,” says Adrian Wood, owner of one of the city’s oldest barbershops, Paul Molé on the Upper East Side. “Because of the conservatism of the economic times we’re in today, men want to be men again — they want to go to a barbershop to look like a man and act like a man. That’s what it’s all about.”

Music to my ears. It’s a great thing to hear barbershop’s returning to more than just a place for a haircut.