Macaroni (fashion)
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A macaroni, in mid-18th-century England, was a fashionable fellow who dressed and even spoke in an outlandishly affected manner. The term pejoratively referred to a person who exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion in terms of clothes, fastidious eating and gambling.
Young men who had been to Italy on the Grand Tour adopted the Italian word maccherone—a boorish fool in Italian— and said that anything that was fashionable or à la mode was 'very macaroni'. The expression was particularly used to characterize fops who dressed in high fashion with stripes and tall, powdered wigs with a little hat on top which was so high that it could only be removed on the point of a sword. Macaronies combined the enjoyment of wine, sex and song with effeminacy of dress. They are a precursor to the dandy and the metrosexual.
The song "Yankee Doodle" from the time of the American Revolutionary War talks of a man who 'stuck a feather in his hat and called it Macaroni,' the joke being that the Yankees were naive enough to believe that a feather in the hat was a sufficient mark of a Macaroni. Whether or not these were alternative lyrics sung in the British army, they were enthusiastically taken up by the yankees themselves. See Yankee Doodle#Variations_and_Parodies.
See also
References
- Rictor Norton, ["The Macaroni Club: Homosexual Scandals in 1772"] in Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook, 19 December 2004, updated 11 June 2005
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