“Pretty Gentlemen, by Peter McNeil (Yale). In the latter
half of the eighteenth century, a new subculture emerged in England: the
outlandishly dressed “macaroni men,” who flaunted a proto-dandy brand of
masculinity that was often mocked as effeminate. Using sources such as
caricature and poetry, this history examines the trend’s social, political,
gender, and economic implications, and claims for it a role in the construction
of English national identity. The macaroni style, brought from Italy and France
by men who had made the Grand Tour, proved hard to integrate into English
society, which was unused to such frippery. For every aristocratic youth
excited to emulate the new fashions radiating from London, there was another whose
first reaction was to stuff a mouse into a macaroni’s wig bag.”
A macaroni (or formerly maccaroni) in mid-18th-century
England was a fashionable fellow who dressed and even spoke in an outlandishly
affected and epicene manner. The term pejoratively referred to a man who
"exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion" in terms of clothes,
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:
There is indeed a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a
thing of the neuter gender, lately [1770] started up among us. It is called a
macaroni. It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry, it eats
without appetite, it rides without exercise, it wenches without passion.
The macaronis were precursor to the dandies, who came as a
more masculine reaction to the excesses of the macaroni, far from their present
connotation of effeminacy.
Young men who had been to Italy on the Grand Tour had
developed a taste for maccaroni, a type of pasta little known in England then,
and so they were said to belong to the Macaroni Club. They would refer to
anything that was fashionable or à la mode as "very maccaroni". Horace
Walpole wrote to a friend in 1764 of "the Macaroni Club, which is composed
of all the traveled young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses".The
"club" was not a formal one; the expression was particularly used to
characterize fops who dressed in high fashion with tall, powdered wigs with a
chapeau bras on top that could only be removed on the point of a sword.
The shop of engravers and printsellers Mary and Matthew
Darly in the fashionable West End of London sold their sets of satirical
"macaroni" caricature prints, published between 1771 and 1773. The new
Darly shop became known as "the Macaroni Print-Shop".
The Italian term maccherone, figuratively meaning
"blockhead, fool", was not related to this British usage.
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