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. Like a practitioner of macaronic verse, which mixed together English and Latin to comic effect, he mixed Continental affectations with his English nature, laying himself open to satire. Young men who had been to Italy on the Grand Tour had developed a taste for macaroni, a type of Italian food little known in England then, and so they were said to belong to the Macaroni Club. They would call 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 macaronis were precursor to the dandies, who far from their present connotation of effeminacy came as a more masculine reaction to the excesses of the macaroni.

The word ‘macaroni’ appears in David Garrick’s play The Male-Coquette (1757), which features a character named the Marchese di Macaroni. Theatrical mannerisms and clothing that was fashionable to the point of burlesque were characteristic of the macaroni, whose signature was an elaborate wig, often with an enormous pigtail. A typical satire on them is “Dr Young to the Macaronies”. In so far as the macaronies aped ladies’ fashions, they were deemed to be effeminate and sexually indeterminate:

But Macaronies are a sex/ Which do philosophers perplex;/  Tho’ all the priests of Venus’s rites/ Agree they are Hermaphrodites. (‘The Vauxhall Affray’, 1770s )

[as quoted by Rictor Norton, “The Macaroni Club: Homosexual Scandals in 1772”]