Macaroni (fashion)

"Maccaroni" redirects here. For the type of pasta, see Macaroni.
Self portrait of Richard Cosway, a Georgian-era portrait painter, who was known as the "Macaroni Artist"
"The Macaroni. A real Character at the late Masquerade", mezzotint by Philip Dawe, 1773
A fop from "What is this my Son Tom?", 1774

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.

  1. ^ "maccaroni". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
  2. ^ Rauser, Amelia F. (11 October 2004). "Hair, Authenticity, and the Self-Made Macaroni". Eighteenth-Century Studies. 38 (1): 101–117. doi:10.1353/ecs.2004.0063. JSTOR 30053630. S2CID 162279247. Project MUSE 173943.
  3. ^ Hardy, Myronn (2012). Catastrophic Bliss. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 259. ISBN 978-1-61148-494-6.
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference MurphyODriscoll,p267 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).