A macaroni in mid-18th-century England, was a fashionable man who dressed and even spoke in an outlandishly affected and epicene manner. The term pejoratively referred to that 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:"There is indeed a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender, lately 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."
Young men who had been to Italy on the Grand Tour adopted the Italian word maccherone — a boorish fool in Italian — and said that anything that was fashionable or à la mode was '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 maccaronis were precursor to the dandies, who far from their present connotation of effeminacy came as a more masculine reaction to the excesses of the maccaroni.
