The ZINE maker

Alia Soraya, founder and Editor-in-Chief of MulaZine on the subversion of zine culture.

- SYAZIL ABD RAHIM

There is something incredibly infectious about Alia Soraya. Her warm smile, her witty remarks or maybe it’s her talent in putting together engaging visuals and stories on a webpage called MulaZine. What started as “an online archive page for people of the same interest to come back to” has now turned into a pop-culture hub that is packed with an assortment of engaging content—from fashion to music, art, literature and everything in between—and looked up to by people of the creative industry, especially amongst the Gen Zs and millennials. With more than 20 visionaries behind this body of work, you know MulaZine is not here to just exist, it’s here to create impact—and it’s working.

How do you and your team decide what’s the next It thing to cover for MulaZine?

We’d start off with a get together. Eat. Sit down. Then properly discuss what we think would be the best content for this year or month by way of telling each other’s personal stories. I’d usually tell them what I’m inspired by—my mind is a database of memories. Most of the time MulaZine’s projects and ideas are a result of personal experiences or stories. Contributors outside of the Mula team are rare, honestly. We try to integrate a healthy ecosystem to continuously push ourselves and produce work we can be proud of in-house.