TheEconomistNovember 7th 2020 531H
airport, a barber shop, could be
anywhere in the world. A smart logo
on its doors shows a pirate in a tricorn,
flanked by crossbone-style scissors. Giant
photos of tattooed and bearded hipsters
cover its walls. Two stylists trim the beards
of jeans-clad customers. The owner, Ah-
med Zia, a 31-year-old who founded the
place in 2018, explains the logo, which he
designed himself. “I was a fan of ‘Pirates of
the Caribbean’,” he says, “I like the idea of a
team of pirates.” Hence the crossbones-
style theme. He settled on the name be-
cause it sounds like “airport”—a portal to
the rest of the world.
What makes Hairport striking is its lo-
cation: in Kabul, the embattled capital of
Afghanistan. The city is no stranger to
beards. A couple of decades ago, sporting
them was compulsory, a rule enforced with
beatings by the Taliban. But in the past few
were so well maintained, nor were they ac-
companied by tattoos or earrings.Today, however, Hairport is one of
many such barber shops to have opened in
Kabul. Walk around Shahr-e-Naw, a neigh-
bourhood in the city’s centre, and you
stumble across half a dozen, with names
like “New York barber” or “West Style bar-
ber”. Some offer tattoos, too. “The market
has completely changed,” says Mr Zia, who
sports carefully clipped facial topiary. “The
youth now are very interested in new
styles.” They get their ideas from Instagram
and Pinterest, he says, and happily pay 200
Afghanis ($2.60) for a trim. As for skin ink?
“It is prohibited in our religion,” he says,
“but the youngsters, they do not care.”
Globalisation in the traditional sense
has slowed in the past couple of decades.
Even before covid-19 smashed it, global
trade had stagnated for a decade. By last
year, foreign direct investment (fdi) as a
share of gdphad fallen by two-thirds com-
pared with its peak in 2007. The globalisa-
tion of brands, which once seemed unstop-pable, has slowed. From the 1970s to the
early 2000s, the number of countries in
which you could get a McDonald’s soared,
from just two to over 100. But no new coun-
try has welcomed the firm in over four
years. Indeed a few places, such as Bolivia
and Iceland, have demolished their golden
arches. Big expansions of other brands
have failed. In January Walmart, an Ameri-
can retailer, began laying off people in In-
dia and wrapping up its business there.
And yet in recent years a different type
of globalisation has accelerated. A new de-
sign aesthetic is taking over the world,
spread not via brands or fdi, but through
social media and the internet. Even as for-
mal trade slows, the globalisation of taste
is rampant. Starbucks may not have
reached large chunks of the world, but
there are very few large cities in the world
now in which a visitor cannot order a latte
surrounded by exposed wood and vintage
light bulbs. Kabul boasts no McDonald’s,
but you can get a decent burger and fries at
Burger House, a restaurant that would not
be out of place in San Francisco.
A global “hipster index” drawn up by
MoveHub, an international shipping com-
pany, in February, did not include Kabul in
its calculations of the world’s 446 most
latte-soaked metropolises. The firm
ranked cities by the number of coffee
shops, record stores, tattoo parlours, veganGlobal hipstersFlat-white world
KABUL
Even as traditional globalisation has slowed, a new kind has picked up paceInternational