page_title: Macaroni (fashion)
hierarchical_section_title: Macaroni (fashion)
caption_attribution_description: "What! Is this my son Tom?", a June 24th 1774 caricature on extreme "Macaroni" fashions of the 1770s (with a "big hair" hairstyle which echos women's aristocratic styles of the time). Poem in caricature: Our wise Forefathers would express Ev'n Sensibility in Dress&#160;; The modern Race delight to Shew What Folly in Excess can do. The honest Farmer come to town, [i.e. to London] Can scarce believe his Son his own. If thus the Taste continues Here, What will it be another Year? Bibliographic information on LoC site: TITLE: What is this my son Tom CALL NUMBER: PC 3 - 1774 - What is this my son Tom (A size) [P&amp;P] REPRODUCTION NUMBER: LC-USZ62-115003 (b&amp;w film copy neg.) No known restrictions on publication. SUMMARY: "Honest farmer" with adult son who has large, elaborate hairstyle and stylish clothes. MEDIUM: 1 print&#160;: mezzotint. CREATED/PUBLISHED: London&#160;: published by R. Sayer &amp; J. Bennett, 1774. NOTES: British Cartoon Collection. Exhibited: Hair, The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, 2003-04. SUBJECTS: Men--Clothing &amp; dress--England--1770-1780. Hairstyles--England--1770-1780. FORMAT: Satires British 1770-1780. Mezzotints British 1770-1780. DIGITAL ID: (b&amp;w film copy neg.) cph 3c15003 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c15003 CARD #: 95513751
context_page_description: A macaroni 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. He mixed Continental affectations with his English nature, like a practitioner of macaronic verse, laying himself open to satire:
  There is indeed a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender, lately [1770] 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.
  The macaronis were precursor to the dandies, who came as a more masculine reaction to the excesses of the macaroni, far from their present connotation of effeminacy.
context_section_description: 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. He mixed Continental affectations with his English nature, like a practitioner of macaronic verse (which mixed English and Latin to comic effect), laying himself open to satire:
  There is indeed a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender, lately [1770] 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.
  The macaronis were precursor to the dandies, who came as a more masculine reaction to the excesses of the macaroni, far from their present connotation of effeminacy.
caption: "What is this my Son Tom?", 1774
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