Super-sexy actress Eva Mendes says she is baffled by band-aids.
No, not the ones little kids put on their knees and elbows after getting a cut or a scrape. “I understand those completely,” says America’s favorite Cuban-American screen siren with a big smile.
What confuses Mendes are designer band-aids like those made by Brazilian fashion designer Alexandre Herchcovitch that so many celebrities have begun to wear just for affect -- even when there is no underlying injury.
“I’ve seen these designer band-aids on girls like Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen and Blake Lively,” says Mendes, currently starring in the remake of the 1939 catfight classic “The Women,” now showing in theaters nationwide. “Last week I was seated on a plane next to Kristin Wiig and she was wearing 15 of them. It was really a bit off-putting.”
(Contacted by e-mail, Wiig’s publicist says the Saturday Night Live star frequently dons a few brightly patterned “Hello Kitty!” or “Garfield” band-aids when she’s out in public “as part of an ongoing therapy” – but “never” as many as 15 – and that SNL co-stars Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers often do the same. Publicists for the Olsen Twins and Blake Lively had no response.)
But like it or not, designer band-aids have in fact become big business. Fabian Seibert, a German designer, decorates bandages with Swarovski crystals and sells them online at www.suelzkotlett.de and at stores in Europe, including Galeries Lafayette in Paris. (They are also available at www.charlesandmarie.com.)
Last winter, a museum store in Vienna sold 100 of Mr. Seibert’s crystal-studded bandages to women who said that they intended to paste them in the vicinity of their décolletage and wear them to the opera ball.
At the Los Angeles premiere of “The X-Files: I Want to Believe,” the actress Bai Ling paraded down the red carpet with beige bandages on her shins that she had decorated herself.
Of course, novelty bandages, made to look like, say, pickles or yellow police tape, or even human lips, have been around for at least seven years -- many of them available through online design maven Fred Flare. www.fredflare.com And free-spirited adults have long worn children’s cartoon bandages such as Dora the Explorer or Hello, Kitty!
For a time, even Marc Jacobs sold $2 packages of bandages printed with “Ouch!” and “Boo! Boo!” in a box that said “That’s Gonna Leave a Marc.”
“Fashion types are known for wanting attention and I have no problem admiring someone’s style,” said Mendes. “But I refuse to give them my sympathy for a cut that probably doesn’t exist. I hate all forms of deception with a white-hot passion.”
And when it comes right down to it … Mendes thinks this is a fad that “just isn’t going to last.”
“Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes tried this fad in the ‘90s and it didn’t work,” she says. “And Rapper Nelly adopted the Band-Aid look in ‘00s and has since abandoned it.”
In Diane English’s well-received remake of “The Women,” Mendes plays the temptress role originated by Joan Crawford. The film co-stars Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Lisa Kudrow, Anne Hathaway, Candice Bergen, Eva Mendes, Jada Pinkett Smith, Debra Messing and Bette Midler.
