For once it's not the image of Miley Cyrus herself that is controversial. It's the woman lying next to her. In a new advertising campaign for Marc Jacobs, Miley and two female models pose on a moonlit beach, Miley sitting up, staring moodily into the middle distance, a woman standing behind her, while another lies on the sand. This model isn't reclining happily, or curled up asleep; she is flat on her back, hair partially covering her face, with the stiff, sightless demeanour of a body in the morgue. A beautifully dressed one, of course.

This ad campaign was released a day after the latest cover of US magazine Entertainment Weekly, which shows the two stars of upcoming film Gone Girl lying on a gurney. Ben Affleck is fully dressed and alert, curled awkwardly around Rosamund Pike, who is in a bra and slip, pale, wide-eyed with surprise, very much dead. A tag is tied carefully around her toe.

This isn't the first time dead women have been used in fashion or entertainment, of course. Over the years female corpses, especially beautiful female corpses, have become a staple of fashion shoots, advertising campaigns and TV shows – with sexual and fatal violence against women a favourite of TV programmes looking to boost a waning audience or build a new one.

Last year Vice magazine decided to illustrate their Women in Fiction issue with a fashion shoot depicting a range of well-known writers in the throes of killing themselves, or trying to: Sylvia Plath kneeling in front of an oven; Virginia Woolf standing in a stream, clutching a large stone; Dorothy Parker bleeding heavily into a sink. The fashion credits were included in full, down to the pair of tights used as a noose.