KEY POINTS:
The platinum-selling All Angels have returned to a more traditional way of performing.
Classical music received a new image when violinist Vanessa Mae agreed to play Bach while standing in the sea in a transparent dress. But now, more than a decade later, four teenage choir girls are calling for the return to a more demure era.
All Angels - whose first album has gone platinum, selling more than 300,000 copies - have instructed their record company that there will be no bare midriffs, no cleavage and no wet T-shirts in their publicity.
The British girls, Melanie Nakhla, 18, Charlotte Ritchie, 17, Laura Wright, 16, and Daisy Chute, 17, say they want to restore the classic style of Audrey Hepburn, and are starting by covering themselves up.
"We did not want to be transformed into scantily clad pop artists who wore very little and used our bodies to sell music," said Chute. "We wanted to go back to a more traditional way of performing - keeping it clean and focusing on the music."
Chute said the girls had stipulated in their contracts that they would wear only modest outfits.
They are fighting back against a phenomenon - dubbed by one critic as "classical cleavage" - that has been used in recent years to try to boost the sales of music.
The repackaging of classical music as a sassy, sexy industry in the mid-90s began with Mae, and successfully turned some of its stars into multi-millionaires. The violinist may have shocked more traditional listeners, but she achieved hits in 92 countries and last year topped the young entertainers category of the London Sunday Times Rich List, having amassed a 32 million pound ($84 million) fortune.
The idea of turning classical stars into sex symbols has received stinging criticism in the past. One writer in the Financial Times called violinist Nicola Benedetti, who was named the BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2004, "a sort of classical Britney Spears", arguing that she would not be doing so well if she were not young and female.
Benedetti hit back at suggestions that she was being marketed for her looks. "People honestly seem to forget that I actually have to stand up on the stage and play the violin," she said. "I couldn't do any of this if I wasn't playing at a standard that I think is worthy and up here among the other people with whom I'm performing."
Last year Katie Targett Adams, who plays the Celtic harp, criticised the "seedy" sexualisation of classical music and refused to wear suggestive outfits when she performed.
And when All Angels designer Jacob Kimmie was asked to make their outfits for the Classical Brits award ceremony this year - where they were nominated for best album - he was told to try to think of Hepburn and keep them classy.
"There is more to being desirable than stripping off," said their manager, Kathryn Nash, from Universal. "Audrey Hepburn did not feel the need to bare all and I think she has been an inspiration to them. She was one of the most beautiful women in the world and it would be nice to get back to that." Nash said the teenagers hoped to influence upcoming artists and show it was not "all short skirts and baring flesh".
The youngest member of the group, Wright, said she would be too embarrassed to pose in a bikini. She said that artists who did reveal all were not taken so seriously as musicians: "People can get too involved in the image they are putting out and the music doesn't become the front runner. Sound is more important."
She also hopes that their change of image will influence future classical and perhaps even pop stars.
"I hope other bands in the future will take on board that you can get somewhere without it all being about how you look."
The group's stand has been welcomed by those concerned about negative role models for younger girls. "For too long there has been an over-emphasis on sexuality rather than musical ability," said Steve Sinnott, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers in England. "It will be refreshing to see this move away from that focus on sex appeal."
Meanwhile, the girls are concentrating on their school work. But in the coming months they will be recording their second album.
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