"And called it macaroni"

This foolish-looking individual is what was called a "macaroni" back in the day. According to Wikipedia:

The term pejoratively referred to a person who exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion in terms of clothes, fastidious eating and gambling.

Curious Expeditions adds:

Along with reintroducing the Cravat, the Macaroni’s over the top fashion culminated in massive teetering wigs topped by a tiny hat. The hat was often perched so high it could only be removed at sword point. It is these Macaronis that are being referred to in the Yankee Doodle line “stuck a feather in his hat and called it Macaroni”.

According to the OED:

This use [of the word macaroni] seems to be from the name of the Macaroni Club, a designation prob. adopted to indicate the preference of the members for foreign cookery, macaroni being at that time little eaten in England.

The Macaroni Club was tinged with scandal when one Captain Jones, a bit of a Macaroni himself, was convicted of sodomy, though later pardoned, in 1772. A contemporary account in the Public Ledger offers a pointed denunciation of the Macaronis, basically calling them homosexuals, a very serious charge at the time:

You will wonder, my Dears, why I thus rudely address you; you will deem it a mark of prodigious unpoliteness thus to accost a Race, who, however addicted to the crime for which Jones suffers, have, as yet, escaped detection, and therefore cannot fairly be charged with the criminality; but Suspicion, that jealous, troublesome passion, Suspicion is got abroad – the carriage – the deportment – the dress – the effeminate squeak of the voice – the familiar loll upon each others shoulders – the gripe of the hand – the grinning in each others faces, to shew the whiteness of the teeth – in short, the manner altogether, and the figure so different from that of Manhood, these things conspire to create Suspicion; Suspicion gives birth to watchful observation; and, from a strict observance of the Maccaroni Tribe, we very naturally conclude, that to them we are indebted for the frequency of a crime which Modesty forbids me to name. Take warning, therefore, ye smirking group of TIDDLY-DOLS: However secret you may be in your amours, yet in the end you cannot escape detection; nor are we as yet so wholly degenerated by your practices, as not to shudder at the thoughts of Beastiality. (Public Ledger, 5 Aug. 1772) From "The Macaroni Club" by Richard Norton

Comments

[joated]

Sounds like San Francisco and/or Hollywood.