TasWeekend: Barber shops are here to stay

DEMAND for short hair and trimmed beards has helped bring barbers back in vogue. But while hairstyles come and go, it looks like casual barber shops are here to stay.

Three Thirds Barber Lounge owner Spencer Reid at work. Picture: LUKE BOWDEN

PAUL Bromfield is applying the clippers to a man’s head as I walk through the door to his Elizabeth St barber shop.

Small and narrow, the shop is separated from the footpath by a corridor, and a traditional striped barber pole on the street outside is the only indication of what lies inside.

Bromfield introduces me to a regular customer sitting in the chair and invites me to pull up a seat nearby so we can talk while he works.

“I did my apprenticeship when I was 15 and I’m 73 now,” he says, running the buzzing blades over his customer’s head with agile hands.

“I wasn’t very good at school and the things I was interested in, such as art and woodwork, weren’t taught, so my mum said, ‘Well, you might as well get a job’. So I got an exemption to leave school, started working with a bloke on the Eastern Shore, and that was that.”

As he massages lotion into the man’s scalp and follows with a lather of shaving cream, Bromfield tells me he discovered he had a talent for barbering and found haircutting, like the painting he does in his free time, to be a good creative outlet.

I stop asking questions as he hones the blade of a cut-throat razor on a leather strap, since I’d rather he concentrated while using that on someone’s scalp.

Bromfield is a survivor in the trade of barbering.

A few decades ago, there was a shift away from traditional men’s barber shops as the more female-oriented hairdressing salons started absorbing male clientele.

But in the past few years there has been a noticeable resurgence of traditional men’s barber shops.

Long-time Hobart barber Paul Bromfield sharpens the edge of his cut-throat razor on a leather strop at his shop on Elizabeth St. Picture: LUKE BOWDEN

There are several factors credited for the shift, such as men taking more pride in their personal grooming, classic short hairstyles becoming fashionable again and men tiring of the atmosphere of hairdressing salons.

The culture of the traditional shop has returned and men are rediscovering the simple pleasure of a visit to a barber, which tends to be a social as well as grooming experience, perhaps a bit like going to the pub – with less beer, though, obviously.

Most barber shops prefer walk-in trade over a bookings system, keeping the cuts quick and the atmosphere casual.

“If someone comes in and I’m busy, they will usually just wander out for a few minutes and then come back,” Bromfield says.

As if on cue, a young man appears and takes a seat to wait his turn, having never been to Bromfield’s shop before but deciding to give it a go since he needs a trim.

“I just need a haircut,” the walk-in says.

“Which one?,” is Bromfield’s dad-joke response.

Big beards are definitely still in, but they’re looking a lot nicer now.

At Battery Point, at the Three Thirds barber shop, Spencer Reid ducks up to the rear of the store between customers to paint pieces for his honours project at the UTAS Art School.

“Half the time it smells like oil paint, but the customers don’t really care,” Reid says. “They take it as it is. A barber shop is just a space where you talk and cut hair to finance the place. It’s a pretty simple set-up, really. It dates back to how barber shops used to be decades ago. Whatever the barber happened to be into, that’s how the fit-out of the shop was done – whether they were into hockey or whatever, that was the decor, and it attracted like-minded people.”

Reid took up the trade 10 years ago in Manchester. In need of an income, he answered an ad in the paper for a barber’s apprentice and learnt on the job.

Later, in Melbourne, he fell back on his training to get a job in trendy Fitzroy barber shop Dr Follicles.

Now he has his own shop in Hobart and loves the casual, companionable nature of the business. As he cuts a uniformed schoolboy’s hair while we chat, a tradie in high-vis gear wanders in, takes a seat and joins the conversation.

Spencer Reid ducks up to the rear of his Three Thirds barber shop between customers to paint pieces for his honours project at the UTAS Art School. Picture: LUKE BOWDEN

“You have to be able to chat and put some energy into it,” Reid says of creating the right experience.

“I love cutting hair. I put some music on and chill out. I love that aspect of it and cutting is creative – it’s another creative outlet for me.”

Reid says he can tell by sight whether someone’s hair has been cut by a barber or a hairdresser. Barbering, he says, makes more use of clippers and razors to grade and fade hair, rather than layering.

The scissors are longer and more use is made of combs in tapering and shaping.

“If a hairdresser does a man’s hair, it has a much softer aesthetic,” Reid says. “I do a lot of women’s hair, too, of course. Mostly for women who like short hair but don’t want the frills of all the usual hairdressing salon stuff.”

When I mention his long, curly hair, Reid laughs.

“My partner isn’t a fan of the short-back-and-sides look,” he says. “I don’t have a problem with it, I just get lazy and it’s easier not to do it.

“I guess I’m not really selling the art of barbering that well, huh?”

The popularity of sharp, clipped cuts is driving the resurgence of barbers shops. Short hair is in vogue, especially closely clipped backs and sides, as well as skin-fades, trending alongside the renaissance of 1940s and ‘50s fashions.

The return of the beard has helped as well, especially now that the shaggy ironic hipster beard is starting to give way to more carefully groomed facial hair.

Jay Braslin, who opened Bob’s Your Uncle Barber Shop at Lutana in July, understands the shift in style.

Jay Braslin, the owner of Bob’s Your Uncle, shares a joke with customer Ash Johnson. Picture: LUKE BOWDEN

“Big beards are definitely still in, but they’re looking a lot nicer now,” he says. “I once heard a barber say they didn’t do ‘fashion’, they just do ‘style’. And that’s what barbering is about. Classic haircuts, with modern twists, perhaps, but not just doing something crazy for sake of it.” Braslin did a hairdressing apprenticeship in Hobart 17 years ago.

He took up the trade intending to do men’s hair, but found there was nowhere locally to study barbering. After 10 years as a hairdresser, he switched to barber shops.

“The first time I walked past a barber shop in Melbourne it was like a revelation to me,” he says.

“There was music blaring and it looked sort of dingy. There were obviously people cutting hair in there, but it didn’t look like any salon I’d worked in. It was totally different to what I was used to and I knew that was what I wanted to do.”

Braslin finds the renewed popularity of barber shops a little puzzling but is happy to embrace it.

“I can’t believe it ever died off, really,” he says. “I worked with a lot of barbers from the UK and Ireland when I was in Melbourne and they thought it was weird that it had become some big scene because where they were from it had never died off.

“There’s a big generation gap in barbers now, where they’re either in their 70s or they’re really young.

“And now that shops are back open, even if that look changed to scraggy and messy tomorrow, people would still be going to barber shops because they are set up now. Men are back in that habit.”

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Originally published as TasWeekend: Barber shops are here to stay