not your costume
- idiom
- Texting
:
no es tu disfraz
- At the party, she reminded him that a kimono is not your costume but a part of someone's cultural heritage.
Examples
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Choosing to wear traditional Native regalia as a fashion statement ignores that it is not your costume.
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Many activists have stressed to festival-goers that indigenous attire is not your costume.
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Please remember, that is not your costume!
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This traditional dress is not your costume.
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At the festival, she explained that wearing a sari is not your costume but a meaningful expression of another culture.
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During the meeting, he emphasized that donning someone else's traditional outfit is not your costume and can be seen as disrespectful.
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Activists often remind people that cultural symbols are not your costume and should be treated with respect.
Synonyms
A phrase that says you should not use another culture's clothes or symbols as a costume
How Appropriate
Surface Forms
Morphology
The literal composition 'not' + 'your' + 'costume' clearly yields a core meaning that the costume does not belong to the addressee, so a B1 learner who knows the words can recover this basic sense. However, the intended pragmatic/sociocultural meaning — that wearing the costume would be culturally appropriative or offensive — requires world knowledge and pragmatic inference beyond the constituent meanings, so the phrase is only partially transparent.
Etymology
Not your costume comes from the image of someone putting on someone else's cultural clothes as a fun dress-up outfit. Saying not your costume tells people the costume is not a toy, so 'do not wear or copy it' because it is 'disrespectful'.