Céline Semaan: The Slow Factory

Céline Semaan is a Lebanese-Canadian designer, activist, and systems thinker who channels fashion into a force for environmental and cultural transformation. Raised between the aftermath of war and the weight of exile, her lived experience forms the foundation of her work. She approaches fashion as a cultural infrastructure, one that must be unlearned and re-rooted in justice. Céline founded Slow Factory as an institute, lab, and movement focused on environmental literacy, regenerative design, and human rights. 

It emerged as a response to systemic harm, offering tools, education, and frameworks that align with both planetary and social thresholds. Through education, it serves as an anti-colonial learning platform for a wider audience, and through Study Hall, provides a gathering space for Global South and Indigenous leadership.

(Image Credit: Celine Semaan and The Slow Factory)

The Slow Factory

She coined the term #FashionActivism to name what had long been absent from the industry - accountability, storytelling, and resistance through material culture. She views garments as evidence of labour and power, and uses design as a narrative tool to shift perception and policy. At the Slow Factory Lab, she and her team develop alternatives that refuse extraction. One such innovation is Slowhide, a biodegradable, plant-based material created from tea and coffee waste, offering a grounded counterpoint to conventional leather.

(Image Credit: Celine Semaan and The Slow Factory)

Among their most powerful initiatives is Landfills as Museums, a provocation that treats dumpsites as cultural archives. They challenge the industry to move from symbolic sustainability towards structural change by centring waste in the design process. Her philosophy of waste-led design treats discarded matter as a starting point, not an afterthought reframing waste as a site of knowledge and future design.

Her work spans material science, pedagogy, cultural strategy, and policy. It has been recognized by Harvard for educational innovation and honoured by institutions committed to climate equity. But Semaan’s true impact lies in the consistency of her vision. She builds frameworks that resist dilution, reject tokenism, and hold space for discomfort and complexity. She does not soften her message to fit commercial timelines. She pushes the conversation forward with clarity and conviction.

Céline Semaan positions fashion as a mirror of sustainable values and a blueprint for how we might live differently. Through her, design becomes an act of resistance and restoration. Through Slow Factory, Céline has created an ecosystem that give voice to theory and practice, material and story, science and justice.