‘Those girls were jealous’: Latina teen wears a quinceañera dress to prom and gets kicked out for ‘cultural appropriation’

A TikTok user has shared a student’s experience in which she found herself being escorted from prom by armed security simply due to the fact that she was wearing a quinceañera dress.

Today’s story is a pretty frustrating one, get used to it TikTok is full of them. In a video shared by user @djlostone (Dj Lost One) he recounts the story of the anonymous student, who goes by the name Jasmine. Jasmine is Mexican-American and a sophomore in high school with her quinceañera around the corner. A quinceañera is essentially a big celebration of a girl’s 15th birthday, it’s a pretty big deal coming of age celebration in Mexican and Latin-American cultures. Anyways, Jasmine put a lot of effort into her dress, so decided she’d also wear it to prom. However, Jasmine ended up being kicked out of said prom due to “cultural appropriation,” but I wasn’t aware it was possible to appropriate your own culture.

Obviously, this is a pretty frustrating situation, considering Jasmine was well within her rights to wear a quinceañera dress. It was discovered that a complaint had been made about her wearing the dress prior to her arrival — apparently, a claim was made that “she would make other students feel uncomfortable for wearing the quinceañera dress, as it was cultural appropriation.” Once again, Jasmine is Mexican and therefore, her wearing the dress should not be a problem. Despite this, she was still removed from the prom and her night ruined over basically nothing.

In his investigations, Dj Lost One discovered that there were only 5 Latino students attending Jasmine’s school, and so he determined that it was likely that the students who made the complaint were white, which makes the whole thing even more frustrating. 

TikTok users shared their own thoughts on the situation, suggesting motivations for why the students would report Jasmine, as well as expressing anger at the whole situation.

soo… those girls were jealous, bc I know Quince dresses are always fabulous!

So she got escorted because her dress was too pretty? Like is this for real???

beautiful dress.. sounds like these others girls where jellious

Of course, this was a big mistake on the school’s part; as it turns out, the parents of one of Jasmine’s friends are actually lawyers who specialize in racial discrimination cases, and they’re now apparently engaged in a civil lawsuit seeking $250,000 in damages.

In a follow-up video, Dj Lost One says that he thinks they should be suing for even more money, he also gives a few details regarding what the dress looked like — and honestly, it’s a very nice dress. He also shared a rough estimate as to how much it would have cost. In case you’re wondering, it cost somewhere around $180.00 for the base, but the modifications she added brought it closer to $300.00. I probably would have wanted to wear that dress to prom, too, if I’d spent that much on it.