Osman Yousefzada is one London designer who has shown a knack for building his business without an active investor on board. Not only is he consulting for a high profile British luxury chain, he is collaborating with Mango to release a capsule collection of little black dresses which will hit Mango stores worldwide in March, after an exclusive selling period at Selfridges in London. These projects help Osman by injecting cash to finance production and operating costs for the business.

Mango also hosted Osman's show today in its Oxford Street flagship, causing quite a stir as regular shoppers mixed in with London's fashion flock. The choice of location works for both parties because Osman gets free space and solid evidence of his partnership with Mango, while Osman brings new people into the store and ups its Mango's fashion cred. Perhaps it does not have the quirky ambiance of a schoolhouse in Shoreditch or a tunnel in the South Bank, but it does the trick anyway, and the long catwalk allowed many of the buyers and press to see the clothes up close.

Osman's collection of minimalist layered shift dresses was accented with draped

, something of an Osman signature, and occasionally injected with color or accent at the waist, which sometimes evoked the style of a matador. The coloured pieces were best, and stood out on the clean tailored lines of the collection. The injection of colour was also in tune with the Autumn/Winter collections we saw for Fall on the New York catwalks.

Osman has recently been nominated for the annual Design of the Year award at the Design Museum, alongside modern fashion design heavyweights like Issey Miyake and Pierre Hardy.