Cooper Hewitt says...
Céline Semaan Vernon (b. 1982) is a Lebanese-born designer based in Brooklyn, New York. Semaan’s family fled her home country for Canada when she was four years old. As a refugee, social activism has remained at the core of her work in fashion and beyond. An MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow, she has background in user experience design, information architecture and multi-media art. In 2012, she founded Slow Factory, a fashion label and design lab dedicated to human rights and sustainability stewardship. With the mission to “re-architect fashion into a zero-waste, circular industry,” it supports humanitarian and environmental causes through fair-trade practices and eco-friendly materials. Deriving its name from “slow fashion,” the brand’s first collection featured silk scarves printed with NASA satellite imagery. Slow Factory is also the entity behind Study Hall, an annual summit on sustainable fashion that takes place at the United Nations, and The Library Study Hall, an education initiative and non-profit organization committed to sustainable literacy. As a writer, Vernon has contributed to a number of publications, including The Cut, Elle, Refinery29, Huffington Post, and her work has been featured in Fast Company, The New York Times, Scientific American, Teen Vogue, Vogue, and many more.
