Why 18th-century British men were mocked for calling themselves pasta

Cultures · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: In the 1700s, young British men returning from the Grand Tour adopted a flamboyant style that defied gender norms. They called themselves macaronis, a term that became a pejorative symbol of excess, effeminacy, and social anxiety. This subculture paved the way for the dandy, forever changing British fashion and identity.

The macaroni subculture emerged in 18th-century Britain as a direct result of the Grand Tour, a traditional rite of passage for wealthy young men. Upon returning from Italy, these travelers brought back a taste for pasta—then a novelty in Britain—and founded the Macaroni Club in 1764. The term quickly evolved from a culinary reference into a pejorative label for men who pushed the boundaries of fashion, eating, and gambling. To be called a macaroni was to be accused of abandoning British nature for Continental affectations, much like the linguistic mixing found in macaronic verse.

Visually, the macaroni was unmistakable. By the 1770s, the look featured tight, short coats, colorful stockings, buckled shoes, and lace-edged muslin cravats. They wore towering, powdered wigs topped with tiny tricorne hats or a chapeau-bras, often accessorized with a large nosegay of flowers. Satirical print-shops, such as the one run by Mary and Matthew Darly in London, fueled the public obsession, publishing caricatures that mocked these men as effeminate, neuter, or even sodomitical—a serious charge in an era where homosexuality was punishable by death.

Modern historians like Peter McNeil suggest that while some macaronis used high fashion to signal new class identities, others may have been asserting what we now recognize as a queer identity, potentially linking them to the earlier molly subculture. The phenomenon was so pervasive that it infiltrated literature and song. In Oliver Goldsmith's 1773 play She Stoops to Conquer, a character fears being mocked in a print-shop as a macaroni, while the lyrics to Yankee Doodle famously joked that a simple feather could make a naive Yankee believe he was a fashionable macaroni. Ultimately, the macaroni served as a precursor to the Regency-era dandy, representing a broader shift toward consumer capitalism and changing nationalisms in Georgian Britain.

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