“Yankee Doodle” is a song that has a line that, as a kid, always stumped me:
“Stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni.”
Why would someone call a cap with a feather in it a kind of pasta? Because the “macaroni” being referenced is *not* a pasta, but a type of fashion. A fashion we’ve all seen in period movies and old illustrations; a fashion that I suspect most readers of this blog looked at with some combination of confusion and disdainful amusement. Behold, then, this helpful video about the rise and fall of this ridiculous, mostly-English, fashion trend:
In short, it started as a way for the super-rich and “social betters” of the time to visually distinguish themselves from the plebs who could not hope to afford this sort of extravagant garb. It started off goofy enough, but eventually morphed into full-blown ridiculousness before disappearing into a cloud of universal mockery, replaced with much more modest fashions. During its life it saw the male practitioners make themselves look more and more feminine… until they were replaced with a vastly more masculine and respectable look.
As has been said, history doesn’t repeat but it does rhyme. So *perhaps* the history of macaroni fashion might be a useful guide to our own time. The fashion then was for ridiculous self-absorbed jerks to wear ridiculous over-blown and de-masculinizing fashions… until society simply had enough and laughed them out of existence. Today? Hmmm. Sound familiar at all? Difficulty: back then, practitioners of macaroni could scrape the makeup off their faces, take off the silly wigs and stupid outfits, and put on a practical wool coat and a simple tricorn hat. Today, they’d have to do more than wash the blues and pinks out of their mental-illness haircuts and take off the cringey woke T-shirts and the fifty pounds of drag makeup and dresses, they’d have to reverse various body modifications. Good luck with *that.*
In a way, though, this sort of goofy fashion trend is useful for sane people: you see someone done up in duds like this, you know that that person is not someone to take at all seriously except as a vague threat.