Macaroni (fashion)

During their trip, many developed a taste for maccaroni, a type of pasta little known in Britain then, and so they were said to belong to the Macaroni Club,[5] founded in 1764 by those returning from the Grand Tour.

[7] The Italian term maccherone, when figuratively meaning "blockhead, fool", was apparently not related to this British usage, though both were derived from the name of the pasta shape.

[5] Author Horace Walpole wrote to a friend in 1764 of "the Macaroni Club [Almack's], which is composed of all the travelled young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses".

[8] 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.

[6] The shop of engravers and printsellers Mary and Matthew Darly in the fashionable West End of London sold their sets of satirical "macaroni" caricature prints, published between 1771 and 1773.

Dr. Richard Shuckburgh was a British surgeon and also the author of the song's lyrics; the joke which he was making was that the Yankees were naive and unsophisticated enough to believe that a feather in the hat was a sufficient mark of a 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
The prominently-crested macaroni penguin