Helen Mirren, Tracey Emin, Ellie Goulding, Laura Mvula, Katie Piper and Karen Elson - it’s a roll call of talent you’d expect to see adorn a cover of Vanity Fair.

Helen Mirren, Tracey Emin, Ellie Goulding, Laura Mvula, Katie Piper and Karen Elson - it’s a roll call of talent you’d expect to see adorn a cover of Vanity Fair, particularly when you consider they’ve been collectively snapped in highly stylised images by Annie Leibovitz.

Yet instead these are the faces, alongside others such as Jasmine Whitbread and Helen Allen who are less well known but equally impressive in their own fields, that are being backed to resurrect the fortunes of Marks & Spencer in its latest ad campaign.

Predictably, the campaign is being taken as a symbol of how important the success of the new season’s range
is to boss Marc Bolland’s prospects at the retailer.

But it should also act as part of an extraordinary sign-off from M&S’s marketing guru Steve Sharp, who has masterminded memorable campaigns for the retailer before but has surely equalled his best efforts here.

The radical departure from the era of Twiggy and Myleene Klass has certainly caught people’s attention.

But the new focus on these high-achieving women also dovetails with the efforts of general merchandise boss John Dixon and style director Belinda Earl to restore M&S’s credibility as a go-to destination for women’s fashion.

M&S’s problems run deeper than its advertising, as eight consecutive quarters of declining clothing sales show. But combined with the warmth with which Earl’s first collection was greeted, this latest campaign has the power to persuade women to take a fresh look at M&S. From then on in it’s down to product.