Eva Mendes and Ryan Gosling are a notoriously private couple. But while Gosling has waxed lyrical in recent months about the joys of fatherhood, Mendes has generally stayed quiet on the subject of the couple’s two children, Esmerelda Amada and Amada Lee.

Now, though, she has opened up about the importance of letting her little girls express their personalities through their wardrobes.

Speaking to E! News at the launch of her newest collection for New York & Company, Mendes admitted that she is grateful that her children remain untouched by the fashion industry for the time being.

“Thank God there’s no fashion talk,” she said. “But I let them wear whatever they want… they have the right.”

Explaining that she is keen for her children to forge their own identities, Mendes continued: “If they want to wear jammies all day or if they want to go in a costume to the market, I let them do that stuff.

“I let them win that battle. That’s the easy one. I’m trying to get them to eat broccoli. That’s the one I want to win.

“But they can wear whatever they want.”

And, when asked how becoming a mother had affected her own aesthetic, Mendes replied: “Even though I have less time to think about what I’m wearing for my day or how to put something together, I think of it more in a sense of even if I’m not with my kids, I’m always representing them.

“It’s always on my mind.”

Mendes previously sat down and explained why she and Gosling decided to recycle the name Amada for their second daughter.

“We had a few names picked out for our new baby, and when she was born, we didn’t feel like those names were her,” she told Latina magazine. “We came up with a few more, even that morning, and tried them out. We were like, ‘What about Viviana?’ But we just kept going back to Amada.”

The actress, who was born in Florida to Cuban parents, says that it’s not unusual to reuse names in Latin culture – “I used to know five sisters that were all Maria del Carmen, Maria Elena, Maria Liliana” – and reveals that Amada is also the name of her grandmother, as well as being Esmerelda’s middle name.

“So we went with Amada because it was something we kept going back to,” Mendes says. “We thought how beautiful to go with what made us emotional and with what felt like her. When we looked at her, we thought, ‘Aww, Amadita’.”

Image: Getty