When Prince Harry weds Meghan Markle on Saturday at Windsor Castle, other than watching a pretty good bloke marry a beautiful woman, many citizens of Planet Earth will tune in for the fashion. Let’s be honest, you could hand the family or your watch party guests score cards like Olympic judges and have some real fun. But, what is up with fascinators?

Remember when Princess Beatrice wore the contraption in the feature picture to cousin William’s wedding to the former Kate Middleton. It’s clear what the designer was going for, maybe. It looks to me like a hat with a bow down the back had been partially tipped up to perpendicular. I thought the hat was as ugly as homemade sin, but Bea sold it on Ebay and raised $131,000 U.S. for charity. That’s a nice chunk of change. Eugenie’s dragonfly hat was at least semi-flattering.

I just don’t get why anyone would pick a fascinator over a lovely hat. You don’t have to go Kentucky Derby Day crazy. After all, if the guests for six rows behind you paid gonzo bucks to be at Windsor, got up in the middle of the night for hair and makeup, got to the wedding venue nearly two hours early (required) and want to see the Bride and Groom, it would be in very bad taste to wear a gi-nor-mous hat.

So what is a fasinator? Here is the answer from Co.Design.com:

Originally, the word fascinator referred to a lacy piece of fabric women would drape over their heads in Europe in the 1600s, presumably because one had to fasten it (the spelling “fastenator” might have been more appropriate). According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the head shawl was meant to add “seductive mystery” to Victorian fashion. The word popped up in the U.S. in the 1860s, and even had a shout-out in the musical Oklahoma! in 1943–still referring to lacy head wraps. But soon after, the term disappeared from the fashionista’s lexicon.

According to Stephen Jones, a British milliner who has dressed the heads of Rihanna, Janelle Monae, and even Meghan Markle herself, the fascinator was rebranded by the New York-based hatmaker John P. John in the 1960s. John decided to apply the term to then-popular cocktail hats, which were designed to perch atop a lady’s head while still preserving her updo. “In the 1950s, in America, small hats had been called clip-hats or half-hats, but ‘fascinator’ sounds much more alluring,” Jones told Vanity Fair. “It was a marketing ploy by Mr. John that was extremely clever.”

No hat hair. Epic. I get it.

If you are watching the Royal Wedding and want to augment your jammies with a fascinator. Here is a quick tutorial video from Open Colleges:

The whole family could wear fascinators. How quickly my dog gets out of it will be fun to watch.

Remember Victory Girls will keep you up to date on Royal Wedding deets.