NEW JERSEY HAIRCUT.(The Talk of the Town)

"You want a New Jersey haircut?" Vito Quattrocchi said the other day. "Move to Florida." He was referring not to the cut you might get in one of those sleek New York-style salons that are increasingly relocating to the suburbs but to the no-frills barbershop treatment that seems, like the independent bookstore or the Atlantic salmon, doomed to extinction. Quattrocchi was standing in front of the mirror at the Ames Barber Shop, in Rutherford, New Jersey, where he works and gripes. He has been cutting hair since he was sixteen, and, now that he's fifty-one, he likes to call himself a "dinosaur," even though, by his own estimate, he is the second-youngest barber in New Jersey. ("I know one younger guy, Ciro Alvino, up in Butler," Quattrocchi says. "He's forty-seven.")

In New Jersey, there is no such thing as a new barber, not since the passage of the Cosmetology and Hairstyling Act of 1984, which did away with the State Board of Barber Examiners and--in the spirit of Jon Bon Jovi, mall bangs, and rattails--made beauty care the only game in town. Don't be fooled by all the striped poles spinning outside storefronts in, say, Hoboken. "They might look like barbershops, but they're not," Quattrocchi said. "They're beauty parlors." For some twenty years, Quattrocchi had his own barbershop, Vito's, in Hoboken, where there were dozens of competing shops; now there are only two or three. Many of the Old Guard, nearing retirement age and facing profit squeezes in the metrosexual era, have moved to Florida, where they can transfer their barber's licenses. "Within the next ten years, you're not going to see barbers at all," Quattrocchi said.

Whether the ascendance of hairdressing was the result of lobbying by beauty colleges, as Quattrocchi contends, or bureaucratic streamlining (the official explanation), state law now requires aspiring scissorsmiths to demonstrate high-school equivalency and complete twelve hundred hours of accredited (and often expensive) cosmetics training. These are not prerequisites that favor the immigrant base from which barbers have historically come. Previously, an aspirant worked two years as an apprentice to a licensed barber, and two more as a journeyman, after which he became a master--a licensed ...