
thumb|Catherine, Princess of Wales, then [[Duchess of Cambridge, wearing a red fascinator during her visit to Canada in 2011]] thumb|Antoine Watteau: Studies of a woman wearing a cap (1717–1718)
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thumb|Catherine, Princess of Wales, then [[Duchess of Cambridge, wearing a red fascinator during her visit to Canada in 2011]] thumb|Antoine Watteau: Studies of a woman wearing a cap (1717–1718)
A fascinator is a formal headpiece, a style of millinery. Since the 1990s, the term has referred to a type of formal headwear worn as an alternative to the hat; it is usually a large decorative design attached to a band or clip. In contrast to a hat, its function is purely ornamental: it covers very little of the head and offers little or no protection from the weather. An intermediate form, incorporating a more substantial base to resemble a hat, is sometimes called a hatinator. In recent times, especially in countries like Australia and New Zealand, the term ‘fascinator’ has devolved to often refer to mass-produced cheap hairpieces (and used in a more derogatory sense); pieces handmade by qualified milliners are referred to instead by the generic term ‘headpiece’, or by the particular style such as cocktail hat, percher, etc.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).