disguise as

disguise (someone or something) as (someone or something)

To cause someone or something to look or seem like someone or something else. Unless you plan to disguise yourself as a potted plant, there's no way you'll be able to sit in on that meeting. I think that statement was just anger disguised as sarcasm.
See also: disguise
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

disguise someone or something as someone or something

to dress or make someone up to appear to be someone or something. We disguised the child as a witch. We disguised Gerald as a pumpkin.
See also: disguise
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs.
See also:
  • be/have done with somebody/something
  • be in line with (someone or something)
  • better of
  • (someone or something) promises well
  • begin with
  • begin with (someone or something)
  • bird has flown, the
  • beware of
  • beware of (someone or something)
  • be rough on (someone or something)
References in classic literature
Cartwright had come down with me, and in his disguise as a country boy he was of great assistance to me.
The Hound of the Baskervilles
For this purpose he assumed the character of a man and visited in this disguise a Sculptor's studio having looked at various statues, he demanded the price of two figures of Jupiter and Juno.
Fables
Joseph upon first meeting Amos, knows immediately that Turnbuckle is not a preacher, however, Washington does see the Lord working through Amos in his disguise as a preacher.
Mysterious Ways
"I have to say I love snowboarding - it's great because you're in disguise as you're enjoying yourself.
I look just like a boy, says Kylie
(1) Freeburg's definition is a straightforward one, but perhaps his approach to the plays was too simple because he saw disguise as little more than a device to generate plot.
The performance of disguise
There are attendant benefits as well for "scholars" in this pastoral Symposium of love: Servais Kevorkian points out the advantage for a character like Celadon to have the opportunity to learn femininity by experiencing it and to learn of sexuality by playing an opposite role.(36) So Celadon twice "becomes" a woman in order to be near his beloved Astree (as "Orithie"(37) and later in the long-standing disguise as "Alexis"); Melandre disguises herself as a man to protect her beloved Lydias;(38) other examples of transsexual disguise for the furtherance of the interests of love are plenty.
"Note the narrator's participation in the game with the use of feminine pronouns to refer to Celadon in his disguise as the young woman Alexis.
Silvandre's Symposium: The Platonic and the Ambiguous in L'Astree
Such viewing audiences might consider Ellen's mannish disguise as mere proof of the assumption that all African women occupy an intrinsically attenuated, oppositional relationship with the classification "woman."
"Yours very truly": Ellen Craft - the fugitive as text and artifact
Such Vor-stellen(25) (implicating the realization of world-as-image as at the disposal of a human agency) privileges the uses of disguise as a strategy of closure.
Textual authority and performative agency: the use of disguise in Shakespeare's theater