MacaronisMacaronis dressed and even spoke in an outlandishly affected manner. The Italian word was adopted in this country by young men who had been to Italy on the Grand Tour and said that anything that was fashionable or à la mode was 'very macaroni'. The word came to denote the people who dressed in high fashion with stripes and tall, powdered wigs with a little hat on top - so high that it could only be removed on the point of a sword. The word 'macaroni' came to refer to a person who exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion and it eventually became a pejorative term. Exceeding the 'ordinary bounds of fashion' was what the macaronies did best - in terms of clothes, eating and gambling. It was certainly not at all the image of a man that was expected by British society at the time. The term macaroni, then, may have been used as a form of insult. Macaronies combined the enjoyment of wine, sex and song with effeminacy of dress. The Macaroni Club and its followers were seen as not only questionable in terms of gender, but also devoid of traditional characteristics of masculine honour and, hence, a threat to bulldog Britain. 
Another contemporary view:
'The life of macaroni is a perfect vacuum. His words are all wind, his actions are all flash, and his thoughts (if he has any) are all phantasms. He eats, he drinks, he sleeps, he walks, he talks, it is true, but in a manner totally different from all mankind; yet the poor thing is very harmless. He would make a good ladies lapdog, would cut a pretty ridiculous figure on a chimneypiece between two urns, or in some nick, by way of a bust. I shall always be ready with my correcting whip, to drive such noxious vermin away, from the society of mankind.'
Christopher Anstey’s poem“Liberality, or the Decayed Macaroni,” written in 1790, gives a humorous but satirical look at what Anstey calls “the frequent artifices of very unworthy petitioners for pecuniary assistance.”
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