Fashion Designer Marina Maclean is also the Editor of Style Scanner. Here she shares the early career jobs in the rag trade that got her to where she is today.

1. Trainee Machinist:
Lasted nearly the entire summer at ‘Traditional Weatherwear’ before my supervisor took me aside to inform me my constant questions were doing her nut in and that I should go to college. I’m very grateful to her actually, she knew someone at Cardonald College and two weeks later – I was a fashion student.

2. Design Assistant to the late Jim Macmillan, Head Pattern Cutter at Bruce Oldfield:
I put a card up in Safeway on Byres Road advertising a dressmaker’s dummy. Jim saw it and was curious about its owner. He’d just set up a studio in Glasgow and needed someone who could assist him with the designing, pattern cutting and sample making.

What Jim couldn’t pay me in cash, he paid in knowledge. I picked his brains and have notebooks of couture techniques and terminology. We’d often spend a whole hour discussing the pitch of a sleeve or the time he fitted Princess Diana/Joan Collins… Jim really made his business a success for a time and had a small factory operation going by the time I left.

3. Saturday girl:
Working for another Jim, this time, my former art teacher and owner of ‘Corners the Framers’ on Byres Road, Jim Quigley. A lot of very respected artists trusted Jim with their work and he had a big workshop in Scotstoun where all the framing was done.

He would put a print down in front of me and say “Right Marina, I want you to think about how you would frame this”. I learned never to choose a frame because it matched a room’s colour scheme! And that a mount or frame shouldn’t overpower the image or influence the composition, think I got it down in the end. He’s probably as close as I got to having a ‘mentor’ because however much I disappointed him, he still believed in me. Very sadly Jim passed away last year.

4. Fashion Show Choreographer and Producer:
I’d made a success of a few big shows in Glasgow and was asked to produce a Britweek showcase in Paris. We booked the ‘new faces’ from Models1 and Select who arrived in Paris from London the morning of the show, running order by 2pm, walk through by 4pm and on at 5pm. I reckon every show probably takes a week off your life!

5.Costume Maker & Designer:
After making a catsuit for Honor Blackman to wear in the title sequence of a TV show (with secret corseting inside which she loved!), people started calling me about costume work and somehow I wound up working on feature films. It’s incredibly hard work but very rewarding.

Once, on the last train home from the Greyfriar’s Bobby set in Stirling I overheard a couple talking about how much they loved the Hammer films. I had a little chuckle to myself because I’d just fitted Christopher Lee for his “Judges cloak”…

I now design and make couture wedding dresses and dabble in menswear. I designed a suit for Pete Doherty last year which you can read about ad nauseam on my blog Style Scanner.

I’m also excited to be collaborating with some of my favourite artists this year. Two of them are Central Station members, Mark Lyken and Omar Zingaro Bhatia.

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.