The New York Times has a great article on the barbershop trend on how it’s sweeping Lower Manhattan in New York City.
“As soon as I saw the place, I felt this deep, inner yearning,” he said. “It’s very striking, with these red barber chairs and this fantastic photo-mural. And it’s rare to see well-dressed, well-groomed men cutting the hair of equally well-dressed guys.”
He was convinced that he’d found the spot where he could get the short, early-1960s-model haircut — complete with a neat side part — that he had wanted for years. And he was right.
Moreover, Mr. Chirico, 26, discovered what other young men in New York have begun to notice in recent months: In the city’s more style-conscious ZIP codes, there has been a renaissance of that much-loved old neighborhood standby, the barbershop.
Proving Fran Lebowitz’s oft-cited dictum that “you’re only as good as your last haircut,” authentic-looking barbershops have popped up all over lower Manhattan. Done up with, say, vintage lighting fixtures, antique barber chairs and, of course, a big glass jar of blue Barbicide on the counter, they are offering good, solid haircuts and shaves for less than half the price of a fancy salon cut. And in a kind of tonsorial version of chicken-or-the-egg, their arrival is perfectly timed, coinciding with the twin desires among urbane young men to tame their unruly locks and look neater and sharper from the neck up, and do it in all-American, gentlemanly, modestly priced fashion, far from the salon smells of peroxide and perfume.
The article points out that there’s a wide variety of barbershops in the city but that many of them can be found in lower Manhattan.
As we know very well, however, this trend goes far beyond New York, and the interest in vintage shaving methods is expressed in more ways than just the resurgence of traditional barbershops.
On eBay, according to a spokeswoman, there’s been a surge of interest in vintage shaving, grooming and barbershop paraphernalia. In comparing a two-week period earlier this month with a two-week period six months ago, she said sales of merchandise returned by the search term barbershop were up 77 percent, sales of Barbicide were up 60 percent, and sales of items found by searching for the words vintage barbershop sign were up 251 percent. On Amazon, archaic devices like straight razors and safety razors, and grooming products (including mustache wax and combs) from Gilded-Age-y brands like Edwin Jagger and Colonel Conk have been selling so well that Amazon created a special category — “classic shave” — to showcase them all. Charles Kirkpatrick, the executive officer of the National Association of Barber Boards of America, said that the number of licensed barbers had grown roughly 10 percent in the last two years, to 245,000 from 225,000.
These are trends that we’re happy to celebrate.
