caseyporn

Doctor Follicles: would you like a beer with that haircut?

It has become my habit to travel without a razor. Indeed, much to the chagrin of airport stores and door-to-door salesmen, I have no need whatsoever for the Mens Travel Accessory Kit, containing the various trimmers, clippers, cutters and cleaners we are assured all Men require if they go Abroad.

(Beards and shaving are topics I have covered before. There is my animated beard adventure, for a start. Of more relevance to this story is my experiences getting shaved across Europe and Asia, and perhaps my thoughts on razors)

My reasoning is simple. If I cannot shave or trim my own beard and hair, yet still am in need of shaving or trimming, then I must take advantage of the facilities offered to me by wherever I happen to be. It's a way for me to add a little necessary adventure to my travel, and I find it kind of fun.

And so I arrived in Melbourne recently, as unshaven and as unkempt as some modern-day Man from Ironbark. In a moment of great serendipity, I saw this sign on Gertrude Street:

Sorry, what was that "small print" there?

Welcome to Doctor Follicles, where you recieve a free beer with every haircut. Before I had even realised what an effect this gimmick could have on me, I was through the door.

Doctor Follicles is a "new" barber's shop. There are now two shops, both in Melbourne, in Fitzroy and Richmond. I had a chance to speak to Paul, one of the founders of Dr Follicles, as he cut my hair and reshaped my beard, and he gave me part of the Follicles story. The philosopy, he said, was to stop understimating men, and to provide a barber-shop experience that appealed to a broader audience. Hence, he continued, the cool music and the Vice magazines to read.

It's true, the music was cool (whoever is working brings their own), but the Vice magazines was an odd call. Interestingly, Oz-blog interbreeding has been talking about Vice, as has the Sydney Morning Herald. Vice is "cool", in some way where it is OK to prescribe $500 jeans and then laugh appreciatively if you throw up on them and send in a photo. It's tough and street and art and graffiti and now, but it delivers all of its content from the lowest point of a muck-laden gutter. So to point to it as a sign that Dr Follicles isn't underestimating or stereotyping men was a bit weird.

Australia, and probably the world, is well overdue for a "new" generation of barbers. Currently, as a man, you have a few basic haircut options. You have a salon - a "hairdresser" - that will start by confusing you with a counter-intuitive definition of "unisex". You will get a haircut for $35 or more, but you will have the option of doing all kinds of funky things to your hair. You can go to a cheap hairdresser, such as a "Just Cuts" franchise. This is like going to a 7-11 instead of Simon Johnson. Much like a convenience store, cheap hairdressers are style-free, over-lit, soulless, lifeless places borne out of - and visited only in - absolute necessity. You will get a haircut for around $20.

Or, the third option, you can go to a barber. Barbers these days are all places that have clung on, relics in old retail strips, that combine an aging man's living room with a couple of cutting chairs. There does not seem to be many young barbers, which means that when these last ones go, their shops will close, and the barber option will be gone.

So, enter Dr Follicles? Their shops offer a cool atmosphere, cool music, young staff, and the same range of men's grooming credentials as the barbers of yore. They're nothing new, they're just the modern version of what, I can only suppose, a barber's shop was when it opened. So I fully expect a growing market for this kind of store.

The beer gimmick certainly doesn't hurt. I got mine, incidentally, just after I sat down on the couch. A cold bottle of Cooper's green, one of the best generally available Australian beers, and it made my wait for a cut very enjoyable. I was offered another - in the same casual way as one would be by a friend heading to the fridge - but declined.

My haircut, also, was excellent. They do not do razor shaves, for the usual reasons (insurance, health risks, equipment costs), but do an excellent and attentive haircut. I didn't offer much of a challenge (a number two and a beard trim, $18 I think, or it could be $22), but the next customer needed some attention paid to his quiff, so they've definitely got "the skillz to pay the billz", as might be written in Vice.

Given the choice between a salon, a convenience-store-like budget hairdresser, and a "new" barber shop, I know which I would choose, even if I hadn't been swayed by free booze. There is something innately pleasant about a barber's shop that makes it an experience I look forward to, each time I travel. I have a feeling, though, that I may be seeing a Dr Follicles in Sydney before too long.

Posted by Casey at May 6, 2005 08:43 PM