thumb|Self portrait of [[Richard Cosway, a Georgian-era portrait painter, who was known as the "Macaroni Artist"]]
right|thumb|"The Macaroni. A real Character at the late Masquerade", [[mezzotint by Philip Dawe, 1773]]
right|thumb|A fop from "What is this my Son Tom?", 1774
"Macaroni" (formerly spelled "maccaroni") was a pejorative term used to describe a fashionable fellow of 18th-century Britain. Stereotypically, men in the macaroni subculture dressed, spoke, and behaved in an unusually epicene and androgynous manner. The term "macaroni" pejoratively referred to a man who "exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion" in terms of high-end clothing, fastidious eating, and gambling. He mixed Continental affectations with his British nature, like a practitioner of macaronic verse (which mixed English and Latin to comic effect), laying himself open to satire.
The macaronis became seen in stereotyped terms in Britain, being seen as a symbol of inappropriate bourgeois excess, effeminacy, and possible homosexuality – which was then legally viewed as sodomy. At the time, homosexuality was frowned upon, and was even punishable by death. Many modern critics view the macaroni as representing a general change in 18th-century British society such as political change, class consciousness, new nationalisms, commodification, and consumer capitalism. founded in 1764 by those returning from the Grand Tour. They would refer to anything that was fashionable or à la mode as "very maccaroni".
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. 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 Macaroni suit, made up of a shorter, tighter fitting coat, colourful stockings, and shoes adorned with large buckles, and, fastened in a large bow, the Macaroni cravat, made from lace-edged muslin, were developed and worn in the 1770s.