“Did I really just walk Prada?!” model Suzana Przulj, still on a post-show high, asks over the phone from her hotel room in Milan. The 21-year-old, who was scouted on Facebook, made her exclusive runway debut yesterday in the Italian house’s Fall 2020 collection—thanks, in no small part, to her boyish coif, which was slicked back to dramatic effect by Guido Palau for the occasion. “I was just trying not to fall,” Przulj admits with a laugh, noting that she’d spent the previous days hard at work: “I was walking up and down in my apartment, in the agency, in the street… everywhere I could!”
Up until a few weeks ago, however, the front-row crowd who took note when Przulj—wearing a crisp shirt, powder blue tie, and sheer skirt— emerged in the basement of the Fondazione Prada would have had to do a double take: “I used to hide my face,” the Bosnian says of her long, frizzy lengths, which she had shorn off at a local salon in her hometown of Sokolac just last month at the urging of her agent. “When I saw myself in the mirror I couldn’t recognize myself, but then I just loved, loved it. There was the new version of me.”
Now, thanks to her “James Dean” chop, which she pairs with no-fuss tees and leather jackets, mornings require little more than a smoothing coconut oil and the occasional flatiron to get out the door—a boon for Przulj, who will soon brave Paris’s crack-of-dawn call times for the final leg of fashion week. “It’s much more simple for me to take care of and maintain, so I think I’m going to stick with [this cut] for some time,” she says before giggling: “But we’ll see what happens in the future.” After all, this rebel without a cause is just getting started.