Fascinator Hats

VEGANGELICA · 05-09-2011, 03:21 AM

Fascinators. Gauche? Preposterous? Adorable?

This thread is dedicated to fascinators -- the good, the bad, the outrageous, the fetching, and the ugly! Share your opinions and show pictures of fascinators that you love, hate, or at which you simply can't help but stare.

I am a little fascinated by fascinators. What is a fascinator, you ask? Here are some definitions:

Quote:

A fascinator is "a delicate, slightly-to-very frivolous head decoration worn almost exclusively by women. A substantial fascinator is a fascinator of some size or bulk. They attach to the hair by a comb, headband or clip." Fascinator - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"As it turns out, a fascinator is a form of headgear that doesn't hug the natural contours of your bonce, as most hats still do, but is a sort of artistic installation attached by glue, hatpins or some other piece of milliner's artifice. Most of these fascinators look like kites that have got lodged in their wearer's head by accident. The real fascination is why on earth anyone would consider themselves more attractive for sporting the sort of arrangement that Liberace would have ordered for one of his dancers."
Q: When is a Royal Ascot hat not a hat? | Michael Gove - Times Online

Before Kate and William's wedding, I never knew about fascinators as a distinct type of human ornamentation. I am now intrigued by this phenomenon of people using peculiar, impractical headpieces to decorate themselves in order to catch attention and to surprise.

What I like about fascinators is that they show people appreciating their individuality even as they copy others. Fascinators, in my opinion, reveal that people enjoy their own creativity and sense of humor, and may admire the natural beauty of other animals, tufted and colorful in ways we are not.

I predict we will be seeing more fascinators now in daily life, for better or worse, because fascinator hats have even hit Iowa! Last week I saw two college women wearing fake flower fascinators that looked a little like Kate Middleton's below, but smaller:

And here are more of Kate's fascinators. I actually think they are kind of cute! However, on the down side, I see that many fascinators appear to be made with real birds' feathers...and that probably means somewhere people are killing birds and collecting their feathers to turn into adornments, which I find sad.

Seeing all these women wearing fascinators made me wonder: are men being left out of this phenomenon? The feminist in me hoped the answer was no. So I did a search, and found...

A male fascinator made with real flowers.

No dead birds here:

And here's what the world would look like if men wore fascinators more often than they do: