Macaroni (fashion)

A macaroni (formerly spelled maccaroni^[1]) was a pejorative term used to describe a fashionable fellow of 18th-century Britain. Stereotypically, men in the macaroni subculture dressed, spoke, and behaved in an unusually epicene and androgynous manner.

The term "macaroni" pejoratively referred to a man who "exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion"^[2] in terms of high-end clothing, fastidious eating, and gambling. He mixed Continental affectations with his British nature, like a practitioner of macaronic verse (which mixed English and Latin to comic effect), laying himself open to satire.

The macaronis became seen in stereotyped terms in Britain, being seen as a symbol of inappropriate bourgeois excess, effeminacy, and possible homosexuality - which was then legally viewed as sodomy.^[3] Many modern critics view the macaroni as representing a general change in 18th-century British society such as political change, class consciousness, new nationalisms, commodification, and consumer capitalism.^[4]

The macaroni was the Georgian era precursor to the dandy of the Regency and Victorian eras.