Marks & Spencer has become embroiled in a sexism row after its window dressers displayed women’s “must-have fancy little knickers” next to men’s “must-have outfits to impress”.

The display in Nottingham town centre was defaced by campaigners who changed the women’s underwear slogan to “must have full human rights”.

The original Christmas display showed images of the model David Gandy wearing M&S suits with the tagline “must-have outfits to impress” adjacent to red and black lingerie behind the tagline “must-have fancy little knickers”.

After it was criticised as “grotesque” and “vomit-inducing”, the display was covered up. M&S claimed the display had been taken out of context from its Christmas campaign.

It said: “We’ve highlighted one combination in our windows, which are part of a wider campaign that features a large variety of must-have Christmas moments, from David Gandy washing up in an M&S suit through to families snuggling up in our matching PJs.”

FiLiA, the organisers of the largest feminist conference in the UK, challenged M&S to reverse the images and demanded to know who authorised the display.

Shopper Fran Bailey posted a photo on the Facebook group Feminist Friends Nottingham, with the comment: “Ok, M&S Nottingham, have we really not learned anything in the last 35 years? Or am I alone in finding this, their major window display, completely vomit inducing?”

While she believed in the rights of everyone to wear “whatever they want”, Bailey said she objected to the window for both its “normalisation of damaging gender stereotypes through the juxtaposition of images of women apparently obsessed with ‘fancy little knickers’ with images of fully clothed men being ‘dressed to impress’ in suits”, and also the slogan “must-have” when “huge numbers of Britons are struggling with poverty”.

She said: “I think M&S using such a strapline is just really crass when so many are without the necessities of warmth, shelter and food.”

She added in relation to the juxtaposition of images: “The problem is that we’re so browbeaten by this sort of imagery that we don’t even recognise what it is anymore. It’s pandering to notions of gender that are so outdated that it’s unbelievable that it’s still being spouted out. I’m disgusted because I’d have thought that M&S was a grown-up store that knew better.

“I know M&S is not the worst offender by any means but this particular juxtaposition is just grotesque.”