Miley Cyrus, the 15-year-old churchgoing television sensation, yesterday apologised to her millions of teen fans for posing nearly nude in Vanity Fair magazine.

The teenager, who plays Hannah Montana in an American teen soap opera of the same name, made by Disney, said that she thought that the photo-shoot led by the photographer Annie Leibovitz was supposed to be “artsy not skanky”.

The picture of the adolescent star posing topless, clutching a satin sheet over her chest, led to angry mothers threatening to hold bonfire parties to burn Hannah Montana merchandise.

“I took part in a photo-shoot that was supposed to be ‘artistic’ and now seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed,” the star said yesterday. “I never intended for any of this to happen and I apologise to my fans who I care so deeply about.”

Leibovitz said that the portrait had been misinterpreted: “Miley and I looked at fashion photographs together and we discussed the picture in that context before we shot it. The photograph is a simple, classic portrait, shot with very little makeup, and I think it is very beautiful.”

The photos in the June issue of Vanity Fair are seen to have marked a loss of innocence of America’s favourite child actress. Millions of children aged 6 to 14 watch Cyrus, the daughter of the country music singer Billy Ray Cyrus, play a schoolgirl who has a double life as a pop star in the Disney series.

Cyrus told the Vanity Fair interviewer that Leibovitz had asked her to do the pose and that she liked it.

But Disney, striving to protect its lucrative children’s franchise, criticised Vanity Fair. “Unfortunately, as the article suggests, a situation was created to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines,” Patti McTeague, a Disney spokeswoman, said.

Vanity Fair countered that Cyrus’s father had been at the shoot. E! Entertainment TV channel, which broke the story, cited a source close to the Cyrus family, however, as saying that her parents had left before the offending photograph was taken.

Lin Buress led the charge of outraged parents on her blog Tellin’ It Like It Is. “I’ve got a suggestion for parents of what should be done with all the Hannah Montana crap that parents have bought for their kids. Bonfire anyone?” she wrote.

Robert Thompson, the director of the centre for television and popular culture at Syracuse University, suggested that there was an element of hypocrisy in the response to the pictures.

“It seems like American culture behaves like it’s in the 21st century, but when it gets offended it’s like it’s in the 17th century,” he said.

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