Metrosexuals of the 18th Century

Boring, ageing right-wingers of today are always complaining about how so many modern young men are voluntarily emasculated metrosexuals, unlike the grand old days when men were real men, etc, with no appreciation that the very same talk had been around a couple of hundred years ago in Britain (and, I expect, other advanced countries).  Read this rather amusing review of a book about the Macaronis of Britain, around the heyday of Captain Cook.  Here's a taste:

As Peter McNeil’s Pretty Gentlemen efficiently illustrates, masculinity was a muddled business in 18th-century Britain. It masqueraded in different guises, literally: in costume, in print culture and on the stage. McNeil narrows in on the ‘Macaroni men’, those dedicated followers of fashion, deliciously lampooned in literature and yet central to the social, sexual and cultural history of Britain from 1760 to 1780....

The Macaroni, he explains, were the fashion eccentrics of the 18th century, marked by their distinctive sartorial preferences: heeled shoes, black satin bows in their hair, fitted jackets, tiny tricorns, elaborate wigs and eyeglasses. They were too loosely organised to constitute a subculture, but from the composite account that McNeil puts together, it is clear that the Macaroni could be as outré as punks once were and as affected as hipsters still are.

For a period of around twenty years, their style seeped into every aspect of public life. Their image was reproduced in stylish portraits and comic prints; their look was emulated by the leisurely classes and roundly mocked by most others. McNeil helpfully describes their identifying characteristics and then determinedly spots them everywhere – from Julius Soubise, a freed slave petted by the Duchess of Queensberry, and Charles James Fox, that most eminent British statesman, to Richard Cosway, the society portraitist, and Joseph Banks, the butterfly-catching botanist who sailed the South Seas....

I have posted a bit about Joseph Banks before.  I assume his fashion habits must have been a bit dandified when back in England, but I don't think he was considered anything other than enthusiastically heterosexual, given his stories of adventures with the South Pacific islanders.   However, the sexuality of other Macaronis (the name being partly derived from their fondness for visiting Europe) was questioned:

They were, McNeil suggests persuasively, a living embodiment of cosmopolitanism in an age of anxious nationalism. And so it makes sense to locate them in the tradition of carnival, burlesque and carousing, a gleefully festive and subversive upending of received attitudes, manners and hierarchies. 
 

This argument makes most sense in terms of the Macaroni man’s ambiguous relationship to conventions of gender and sexuality. McNeil’s detailed account of Macaroni trends – large floral corsages, chatelaines or hanging watches, finely turned canes, decorative snuff boxes, the use of cosmetics, face whiteners, rouge, breath fresheners, even preferred drinks (asses’ milk!) – suggests a profound challenge to ideas of patrician or military masculinity. Trawling through archives of prints and portraits, McNeil assembles a remarkable vision of the Macaroni: canes dangling insouciantly from wrists, toweringly tall toupees dressed with pomade and powder, arresting colours – ‘pea-green, pink, red and deep orange, garnished with a great deal of gilt’. We are accustomed to critiquing the male gaze that is habitually turned to scrutinise female bodies, but here the Macaroni is such a staggering spectacle that we might reflect on the idea of a male gaze powerfully scrutinising the male form too.

Crucially, in McNeil’s account, the Macaroni is an indeterminate personality, not fixed in gender or sexuality. It isn’t obvious that the apparently effete figure of the Macaroni automatically signalled homosexuality, but it is clear that their uniform, habits and culture provided a different and widely disseminated form of masculinity. The Macaroni presented an alternative model of social conduct, concerned with manners and deportment, keen to make visible the consumption of luxury goods and to engage in acts of self-care rather than displays of machismo and swaggering swordsmanship.