From my seat on the plane, headrests seem to sprout hair. I count two comb-overs, a collection of mops in the brown-gray scale, and one spiky do, a waxy nest of hair horns. This is how the barber must see the world: as a jumble of potential haircuts and shaves, our heads and faces nothing more than his canvas, a living array of raw material.
How the barber has fallen. His leatherette chair is largely empty these days; he's being done in by cheap chains, unisex salons, and the 17-bladed razor. The barber's pole, once a symbol of men's fashion, society, and health (barbers were the first surgeons, the striped pole representing the clean and bloodied bandages used in bloodletting), now seems like a nostalgic relic. Or worse, it seems a beacon for the cheap and the old, a place for the discerning man to avoid. In 1962, there were 180,000 barbershops in America. Now there are about 100,000, even though the U. S. male population has grown by more than 50 percent.
Suburban kids like me, when it was time for a trim, accompanied our mothers to pastel-colored salons, put up with the acrid smells, and flipped though issues of Us Weekly while we waited for gum-chewing stylists named Jenny and Donna to tell us about their boyfriends while they worked. But the barbershop was a rare locale, the kind of place that helped ground us in our maleness without violence or competition. This face, this beard, this community (and occasionally, this dirty joke). I'm on a mission to rediscover the barber, and to find the enduring dignity of those masculine sanctuaries that still insist on hair-care establishments being like bathrooms: one for the ladies, one for the gentlemen.
And so, London. After all, we brought our shaving bowls along with our buckled shoes when we set out from Mother England. My first stop was to be the Barber-Surgeons' Hall, home to the Worshipful Company of Barbers, one of the oldest guilds in London. But then came the brush-off : Their members are surgeons now, you see, and have no association with the "lowly trade of barbery." (That's a quote.) "I'm afraid we just can't help you," the spokesman demurred. "And I'd appreciate it if you didn't use my name."
Whatever. The real history of the barber isn't in a clubhouse anyway. It's open for business, in places like the grand district of Mayfair. There, among palatial hotels and bespoke tailors, stand the so-called three T's of English barbering: Geo. F. Trumper, Taylor of Old Bond Street, and Truefitt and Hill. These shops have pruned privileged pates for a combined 500 years. The oldest, Truefitt and Hill, is offering me an apprenticeship (and an appointment). But if I'm to learn anything about the barber, I'll need a host of experiences, so I plan to make a few stops on the way there.
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