M&S ads smack of desperation

I agree with your analysis piece on Marks & Spencer’s “naked” ad (“Naked launch may be bad fit for M&S” MW October 12).

I’m sure most women would applaud M&S’s bid to revisit the body measurements which form the template for all its garments – I understand that the measurements have not been reviewed since the Fifties when, thanks to a poor diet, women were much smaller. But by wrapping this initial good intention in ads where a woman bares all, its efforts have come across as cynical, desperate and ill-judged.

As well as the fact that few British women consider a naked woman running up a hill as in any way “normal”, M&S seems also to have forgotten that a good many of its customers are visitors from the Middle East who would never bare an ankle, never mind their backside.

Christine Taylor

Bradford