B.    The fashion designer

Having set her heart from childhood on a career in costume design, Lilly worked in the theatre straight after school, only to realize that this job wasn't for her. Literature, which she tried next, bored her. “So I sent some drawing off and was accepted for an art degree, which I loved because I had tutors who knew what they were talking about. But it was the head of the course on my master’s degree in fashion who really helped me to develop my confidence and individual style. Every summer, I was taken on for a three- month work placement, organized by the college. I took these really seriously - I can’t understand people who are half-hearted about them. In my second year I was making prints 16 hours a day for a famous designer and some of them got used in his fashion collection.” However, though Lilly did work for a number of well-known designers, there were also discouragingly long periods of unemployment before she finally got a permanent job.