the level to which someone had entered society

Does the highlighted sentence mean

1. the social class of society members

or

2. the degree every person is consistent with the society needs and expectations?

As Amelia Rauser has pointed out, the emblematic notion of satirical prints finally fell aside with the satirical prints of the British macaroni fashions of the early 1770s. In these popular prints, the rakish youth of London were shown flaunting decorum by adopting an Italian fashion of exceedingly eccentric dress and powdered wigs that towered above all others like a huge plate of noodles. In the anonymous 1774 satirical print ‘‘What is this my son Tom,’’ a middle-class father can scarcely recognize his macaroni-styled son. The print includes a humorous rhyme beneath it that concludes, ‘‘If thus the Taste continues Here, what will it be another Year?’’ The macaroni fashion was about celebrity and self-invention and pointed to a transformation in British society from one that focused on maintaining received social roles to one that was starting to accept a more fluid notion of social mobility and identity. The new popularity for caricature in Britain captured what Oscar Wilde would say a century later about gossip in high society: ‘‘The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.’’ Although the caricatures were unflattering representations, they were memorable and indicated the level to which someone had entered society. To a certain degree, caricature and the macaroni fashion both emphasized the uniqueness of individuals over their capacity to conform to societal expectations. The broader change in society that would emerge from this realization—to which the macaroni fashions were mere symptoms—was that the true essences of things were not those qualities that were reducible to absolute types; they were instead the eccentric fleeting gestures and idiosyncratic qualities that embodied the notion of a person’s distinct individuality in his or her caricature.