BOOK DESIGN

The Reject Pile


“Often faceless, always anonymous men, whose identities had been reduced to a point beyond
their status as mere workers to the very mechanical operations of their hands.”

- Max Fraser, Hands off the Machine
The Reject Pile deals with rejection as a failure and the different ways we try to avoid it. It looks at the damaged and rejected garments produced in the garment industry as a direct reproduction of the malfunction of a ‘human’ machine.

​The workers in a garment factory form an assembly
line to create the same garment. They repeat the
same action and each worker has a definite task.
The rejected garments represent their malfunction,
a break in their routine. What makes the factory workers malfunction; and break their daily routine
of repetition?

​I wanted to understand the failure or malfunction these damaged garments symbolise. I was looking at the garments not as rejects or symbols of failure, but as a manifestation of the different, the inimitable.