About the Artist

Bend Lifestyle is a slow-fashion, ethical lifestyle brand founded by artist Vanessa Palermo (she/her). At the ripe young age of twenty-seven, after many months of deliberation, she left her career in mental health searching for a new sense of peace and purpose.

 

Vanessa, like many others during this time, experiences grief for humanity with climate change and an uneasy political climate. With so much out of our control, is there any potential for real change? For things to actually feel hopeful for future generations?

As hope and hard times wax and wane, there are a few constants that Vanessa has turned to for happiness — nature, art and community (and good food, too). Despite looking around, she could not find the right job that would allow her to be truly happy, and because of this, she nursed the idea of creating the opportunity she was looking for. With the gracious support of her loving family and close friends, Bend Lifestyle began as a tiny little daydream, of the kind of world we could have if we all just made some tiny changes.

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Vanessa loves all four seasons and is lucky enough to experience the best of them in Denver, Colorado where she can ski, hike, backpack, boulder and camp. She is learning to identify the different wildflowers of the Rocky Mountains and is a very proud, self-proclaimed cat whisperer. Vanessa studied neuroscience at the University of Vermont and is secretly a big nerd for science and psychology. She is an ENFP and an enneagram eight, though she sometimes wishes she was a four.

Vanessa is a lifetime hobbyist, having dabbled with many different crafts at various points in her life including crocheting, painting, and ice-dyeing. Her best craft is cooking, which she learned from her parents, but she reserves this passion for her loved ones mainly (sorry). One of her greatest joys in life is bringing people together and building community, which she hopes to do through this brand.

Although it has not been all butterflies and rainbows, in the end Vanessa will die feeling most grateful for her family and friends that each add unique vibrance to her life. Her best friend in the entire world is her cat Elfie, who is a long-haired dilute calico with the most adorable and mischievous of temperaments.