In England at the end of the 18th century a movement in fashion was finding its voice through young British aristocrats set on defining themselves apart from the average gentleman. A generation of young and world-wise aristocrats, young men whose custom it was to take the ‘Grand Tour’ of the great European cities of antiquity, returned to England wearing ostentatious clothing that remarked on their cultured travels. They had tasted the fashions in Italy and France at the end of the 1700’s and had returned celebrating and perhaps exaggerating these. It is thought that they themselves applied the name ‘Macaroni’ to their set or maybe the label was given to them but it is sure that a distinct style of dress and presentation came to be associated with the term.

The unofficial ‘Macaroni Club’ of young fashion-setters were the opposite of the staid, traditional, and older ‘Beefsteak Club’ of 18th century England. Whereas the prior generation was content with conventional formality and prided itself on its patriotism, the Macaroni’s were devoted to excesses in fashion and the general consumption of things and conferred great importance on their European experience. They wore their trousers tight and their waistcoats short and sported wigs of exaggerated pomp with curls dangling at their ears. They were also known to adorn their jacket lapels with flowers such as nosegay and to wear the narrowest of shoes that almost impaired their manner of gait. The Macaronis would carry canes embellished with tassels and have as accessories pocket watches and spy glasses and they chose to wear wigs of extreme proportions to further set themselves apart.

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They came to be associated with excess frivolity, effeminacy, and were plausibly the last vestiges of a court culture that was invariably giving way to a mercantile and bourgeois class. The social and fashion elite of the aristocratic class were emblemized by the Macaronis and, so too, caricatured by them. The Macaroni fashion as a cultural indicator of elitist aspirations has seen itself revived in fashion history in the styles of the foppish dandy, the more literary flaneur, and, more recently, the ultra urban metrosexual male.

image: Print of Macaroni fashion, 1774.
image: Print of Dandies, 1830.

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