Martial Vivot, Barber to the Famous and Not-Quite

What The New York Times reported

For its “Up Close” column, The New York Times sent Joshua David Stein to the West 54th Street salon and published a three-page profile of Martial Vivot in March 2011. The piece opens on the clients — the DJ Mark Ronson, the chef Daniel Boulud, the Miami financier Josh Gilinski — and on a salon the paper described as the rare men’s club where uptown power brokers and downtown artists mingle, in the shadow of the Museum of Modern Art.

The Times reported the biography in detail. Vivot was born in Paris and grew up in Djibouti, where his father was stationed with the French army. When the family returned to France and settled in the small town of Besançon, his parents walked him to the village barber and enrolled him as an apprentice; he had cut hair for the first time at thirteen, taking the ponytail off the girl sitting in front of him at school. By twenty-five he was running his own salon in France.

He then left hairdressing altogether for an art-rock band called Murdering Arts Decay, toured for two years, and quit one night by fleeing the band’s van on foot across a field. He still plays drums in a band called Room. A night spent waiting for the Paris Métro, and a long conversation with a homeless man, sent him back to the barber’s chair.

He moved to New York in 1999, worked at two other salons, and opened his own in 2008. At the time of writing a haircut cost $215 and a shave $95, and he capped himself at thirteen clients a day — “I could have 20 people a day, but it would be like a butcher.” The Times also recorded, in its own voice, that the salon had been profiled in Vanity Fair and the Robb Report, was lauded as the city’s best barbershop by New York magazine, and had been called “the most perfect haircut in the city” by the Daily News.