A macaroni (formerly spelled maccaroni) was a pejorative term used to describe a fashionable fellow of mid-18th-century England. Stereotypically, men in the macaroni subculture dressed, spoke, and behaved in an unusually sentimental and androgynous manner.
The term “macaroni” pejoratively referred to a man who “exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion” in terms of high-end clothing, fastidious eating, and gambling. He mixed Continental affectations with his English 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 by the English aristocracy, being seen as a symbol of inappropriate bourgeois excess, effeminacy, and possible homosexuality, which was then legally viewed as sodomy. Many modern critics view the macaroni as representing a general change in 18th century English society such as political change, class consciousness, new nationalisms, commodification and consumer capitalism.
The macaroni was the Georgian-era precursor to the dandy of the Regency and Victorian eras.
A macaroni (formerly spelled maccaroni) was a pejorative term used to describe a fashionable fellow of mid-18th-century England. Stereotypically, men in the macaroni subculture dressed, spoke, and behaved in an unusually sentimental and androgynous manner.
The term “macaroni” pejoratively referred to a man who “exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion” in terms of high-end clothing, fastidious eating, and gambling. He mixed Continental affectations with his English 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 by the English aristocracy, being seen as a symbol of inappropriate bourgeois excess, effeminacy, and possible homosexuality, which was then legally viewed as sodomy. Many modern critics view the macaroni as representing a general change in 18th century English society such as political change, class consciousness, new nationalisms, commodification and consumer capitalism.
The macaroni was the Georgian-era precursor to the dandy of the Regency and Victorian eras.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaroni_(fashion)