Now, you might think you know what I’m talking about here – pasta, right? Wrong. Penguins? No, not them either. Allow me to take you back to the 18th century. If you were a macaroni, then you were likely the most flamboyant and extravagantly dressed man in the room (which was no small feat in an era of powdered wigs and embroidered everything).
A macaroni was the 18th-century equivalent of a fashion influencer – but with more lace, bigger wigs and a worrying obsession with teeny-tiny hats. The term referred to young men who’d been on the Grand Tour, a kind of aristocratic gap year where wealthy Brits swanned around Europe pretending to appreciate Renaissance art. Italy was a popular destination for these men and many developed a taste for maccaroni (okay, so it is pasta-related) which was little known in Britain at the time. When they returned to London draped in silk, covered in frills and with wigs so tall they made walking through doorways a logistical nightmare, they were said to belong to the Macaroni Club – not an actual club, but a subculture of worldliness, superior style, sophistication and enlightenment. They would even refer to anything that was fashionable or à la mode as ‘very maccaroni’.
It wasn’t all fun and games and tiddly hats though. Macaronis came to be seen in stereotyped negative terms in Britain, and as symbols of inappropriate effeminacy and bourgeois excess – satirical prints of the time show them mincing around in ludicrous outfits, clutching canes and sporting expressions of supreme self-satisfaction. And with the aristos over the Channel in France losing their heads, this type of extravagant dressing began to fall out of favour at the end of the 18th century when a more restrained aesthetic took over. Don’t worry though – although the French Revolution definitely put a dampener on the most OTT aristocratic styles, dandyism (led by figures like Beau Brummell) emerged soon after. And while it was a little more understated, it still embraced a meticulous approach to fashion. No small hats though, sadly.
The most famous reference to macaronis is probably in the nursery rhyme Yankee Doodle, where the American hero ‘stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni’. Written by a Brit, the joke was that the Yankees were so naïve that they believed a feather in the hat was enough to turn them into a sophisticated European macaroni.
But what about the penguin, I hear you ask? Well, the macaroni penguin sports a very fetching yellow crest. They were named by English sailors who came across them in the Falkland Islands in the early 19th century, and thought they bore a spooky resemblance to our macaroni fashionistas.