The Handmaid's Tale season 2: Lingerie brand launches limited-edition range should you want to get the 'sexual slave' look

(Lunya/Hulu)

If I've seen one story about Game of Thrones-themed wine I've seen a thousand. Brands cashing in on the buzz surrounding big TV shows is nothing new, but not all of the cases pass a basic sense test.

Take sleepwear company Lunya, for instance, which has just debuted a body slip in the style of Offred, the protagonist in The Handmaid's Tale who is forced to essentially be a birthing machine, being raped by her owner each month in the hope of producing a child in a world where women are largely barren.

“The decision to name this color Offred was rooted in the color itself, being a kind of ‘off Red color,’ and our enthusiasm for the powerful nature of Elisabeth Moss’s character in the show and as a symbol of our solidarity with the Resistance,” Ashley Merrill, Lunya’s founder and CEO, countered in a statement to HuffPost.

The racier interpretation of the handmaids' outfit could indeed be interpreted as a subversion of the normally chaste costume, but most on Twitter were not impressed, with one user @distantgeese writing: "As something of a connoisseur of Shit Ideas I must say this is a real delicacy."

The incident brings to mind Sainsbury's' infamous 12 Years A Slave display.

Merrill pointed out that Lunya is a female-founded company, adding: “Our team is focused on supporting programs and bringing awareness to key issues such as education, opportunity and health for women." Hulu did not sanction the tie-in.