Moreover, Mr. Chirico, 26, discovered what other young men in New York have begun to notice in recent months: In the city’s more style-conscious ZIP codes, there has been a renaissance of that much-loved old neighborhood standby, the barbershop.

Proving Fran Lebowitz’s oft-cited dictum that “you’re only as good as your last haircut,” authentic-looking barbershops have popped up all over lower Manhattan. Done up with, say, vintage lighting fixtures, antique barber chairs and, of course, a big glass jar of blue Barbicide on the counter, they are offering good, solid haircuts and shaves for less than half the price of a fancy salon cut. And in a kind of tonsorial version of chicken-or-the-egg, their arrival is perfectly timed, coinciding with the twin desires among urbane young men to tame their unruly locks and look neater and sharper from the neck up, and do it in all-American, gentlemanly, modestly priced fashion, far from the salon smells of peroxide and perfume.

That spot in Carroll Gardens aside, Lower Manhattan seems to be the epicenter of it all, where these new-old-fashioned places range from the punk-rock-plain (like Frank’s Chop Shop on the Lower East Side) to the fancy-pants (the New York Shaving Company in NoLIta) to the gimmicky (the Blind Barber in the East Village is also a bar). Prices at those places run from $30 to $40 for a haircut and $25 to $40 for a straight-razor hot shave (which has itself become a popular choice).

At C. O. Bigelow in Greenwich Village, sales of high-quality brushes and combs from English firms like Kent, along with straight razors that cost $100 and up, and even old-fashioned leather sharpening strops have all risen 200 percent in the last two years, said the company’s president, Ian Ginsberg. “Guys are coming in here and asking for military brushes, and I can’t even believe they know the term,” Mr. Ginsberg said, referring to the traditional oval men’s hairbrush that has no handle.

But New Yorkers aren’t the only ones fueling this trend. On eBay, according to a spokeswoman, there’s been a surge of interest in vintage shaving, grooming and barbershop paraphernalia. In comparing a two-week period earlier this month with a two-week period six months ago, she said sales of merchandise returned by the search term barbershop were up 77 percent, sales of Barbicide were up 60 percent, and sales of items found by searching for the words vintage barbershop sign were up 251 percent. On Amazon, archaic devices like straight razors and safety razors, and grooming products (including mustache wax and combs) from Gilded-Age-y brands like Edwin Jagger and Colonel Conk have been selling so well that Amazon created a special category  “classic shave”  to showcase them all. Charles Kirkpatrick, the executive officer of the National Association of Barber Boards of America, said that the number of licensed barbers had grown roughly 10 percent in the last two years, to 245,000 from 225,000.