Feature: Izta

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	Chest	Waist	Corset	Hips	Height	Weight
Imperial	30"	24"	19"	30"	5"5'	99lb
Metric	76cm	63cm	48cm	76cm	165cm	45kg

GGotW: What styles influence you?
Izta: In my childhood, like most children, I used to have a great interest in fantasy stories, but especially the horror genre. I used to read a lot of horror novels and as a teenager this interest started to turn more in the direction of movies, music and the Gothic subculture. Over the years the macabre has kept its central place among my influences, alongside other subcultural genres such as punk and deathrock because it matches my aesthetic ideals about beauty and destruction. For me beauty can only reach perfection when it has an element of destruction in it. Run down buildings and people with scars fit in this category for instance. Japanese Guro drawings have also given me a lot of inspiration because it combines the beauty of idealized human beings with all kinds of destruction to their physical appearance. One last influence that reached me mostly through movies and video games is cyberpunk and the post-apocalyptic theme in general, because destruction to a whole society is my utopic ideal.

GGotW: What have those influences done for you?
Izta: All those influences have helped me in developing an aesthetic ideal I like to express in art and my way of living at the same time. For this reason I started to design clothes and accessories in which I try to combine different styles in order to adjust the end product even more to my specific taste. Most of the clothes I model, I wear in real life as well. I refuse to change my appearance as a result of social pressure, because I like to surround myself with beauty all the time. My room is filled with both creepy and colourful decorations, and I'm looking forward to having a whole apartment to decorate:)

GGotW: How long have you been making your own clothes?
Izta: I have been very much into creative projects for as long as I can remember. In my early teens I started to make mostly goth clothing, because I didn't have the money for the stuff that was being sold in shops. My relationship with Raza, which started years later in 2006, put this creative process on the fast track. We discovered that our aesthetic ideals and purposes were very similar and together we developed a lot of ideas to express this. For the first time we started to make complete outfits, which also involved different hairstyles, jewelery and makeup. In this period I also started to model from time to time to show off every completed look, with Raza as my photographer.

GGotW: Have you worked with any other photographers, other than Raza?
Izta: I've worked with a few other photographers, but never with such satisfying results. Their goals and aesthetics are usually different from mine so the pictures don't benefit me much. This doesn't mean I'm not available or interested in other shoots, I just think it's important to share some ideas first to see if you have enough common ground.

GGotW: Have you worked with other models?
Izta: Yes, I've worked with other models on some horror themed shoots. It was a lot of fun to do, but never my own initiative so the styling didn't quite live up to my ideals. It would be interesting though to occasionally include other models in my own projects. It would would have been awesome for instance if I'd had a pretty looking girl model as a dead body to re-animate in my last nurse shoot. It just takes a lot more styling and organizing to include more than one person in a picture.

GGotW: Where do you see your clothing and accessories going?
Izta: In the beginning, making a piece of clothing was mostly modifying an existing item by adding decorations to it. I collect second hand clothes and objects I can use as decoration at flea-markets, to spend as little money as possible, but mostly because of the great variety of things you can find there. Gradually this designing process has become more advanced, as both me and Raza developed more technical skills. My ideal is to develop as many creative skills as possible, so I hardly have to depend on the services of people with different aesthetic views. With this in mind I think I can keep improving my designs and pictures, by adding and combining more styles as well as giving more attention to detail, which is crucial in making interesting pictures. I would like to spend more time looking for nice photo-shoot locations for instance and making back, and foreground props to improve the theme and sphere of my photo's.

GGotW: How do you describe your products to customers?
Izta: I've never made anything with the purpose of selling it. Every item is unique and not easy to reproduce, because I buy so many materials at flea markets and second hand stores. Gathering interesting materials takes so much time that I would have to ask unreasonable amounts of money for one item and I would hate to rip people off. On top of that, I think creating beauty is a much higher purpose than making money:)

GGotW: How has the clothing effected your modeling?
Izta: Gradually the making of clothing has become more important than modeling. I see the pictures usually as the end product of a clothing project and I don't really do shoots anymore when I don't have a new outfit and theme ready. Of course it's very tempting to keep producing pictures at a rapid pace, but doing too much of the same thing would only compromise the quality. A lot of people seem to think looking pretty is the only important thing in modeling, but for me pictures have to look interesting on more than just one level.

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