FOR his 16th birthday, Marc O'Neill got a sewing machine. His girlfriend at the time laughed at the idea. "I never thought of it as an odd thing to be doing," he says. "I used to cut up garments, I used rip shirts at the seams and iron them. That was before I learned how to make a pattern."

Today O'Neill designs exclusive collections for the A-Wear store and exclusive lines for Brown Thomas' store in Dublin and Barney's in New York. He has also designed for several leading Irish bands and a number of hotels. He's currently working on designs for the Corr's next tour.

His workshop is in Newmarket, Dublin. Here new and slinky fabrics such as crepe, shantung silk, twill, lingerie lace and embroidered net, hang side by side. This season his colours are charcoal, stone, pecan brown, midnight blue, carbon, burgundy.

As a youngster, he was "always a little bit into design, sketching people and their clothes, and conscious of how to dress myself - there was always a level of creativity in my family." He feels that boarding school from the age of eight "led me into my own little dream world. I liked the idea of being able to make clothes for myself. At boarding school I set up my own workshop - I had an ironing board, a cutting table. I was given a room and I used to make waistcoats, trousers and shirts. They were my main speciality. I used to have old pennies for buttons. I did a roaring trade and I made a few bob." At 15 he spent a month in the Grafton Academy of Dress Design. "It was very useful - gave me a good idea of how to make my own patterns. I learned sewing techniques. Before that I was taking garments apart and trying to work out how they were made."

After the Leaving Cert, O'Neill applied to the National College of Art and Design and went straight into second year on the strength of his fashion portfolio. "The degree course was very good," he says. "I was doing exactly what I wanted, cutting patterns, making garments, all sorts of different things were built into the course."

Before his final year, he took a year off and went to France to work for a couturier just outside Paris. He also had his first one-man show while he was still a student. The exhibition attracted up to 100 people to a hairdresser's salon on South Great George's Street. "We suspended everything from different levels."

He graduated in 1993 with an honours degree in fashion design, was nominated Irish fashion graduate of the year and best NCAD fashion graduate - and he was a Smirnoff Young Designer finalist on two occasions.

O'Neill then he went to Leicester to do a master's in design management. There were five on the course. "It was design-related business. Everything was taught in a way that was relevant to design. The whole thing was project based. I learned a lot.

"The main thing was how to co-ordinate the running of a design business rather than just coming up with an idea and then working out how you are going to sell them and market them. It taught me how to break down the whole process and be a little bit more realistic."

He has shown his work in Tokyo and at the London Fashion Week. Fashion, he says, is exciting and volatile. He's exhibited at the Futura Fair in the RDS.

He advises any young person interested in this career to keep all their ideas together. "Start jotting them down. Draw as much as possible. You have to have a portfolio - with up to 20 pages of design drawings - to enter any fashion design college. What a lot of the assessors want is to look at your ideas' notebook. Cut out anything that appeals to you in magazines and newspapers.

"An ideas' notebook gives you a better impression of how a person is thinking and what knowledge he or she has of design."