How fashion, TikTok and Kpop are helping classical music find a new audience

But the aesthetics of the Acne’s campaign also hints to a nostalgia expressed in pop culture generally. The grainy images are reminiscent of another fashion label using similar expressions, namely ERL (Eli Russel Linnetz). In their spring/summer collection for 2022, the models look like their taken directly out of films such as Dazed and Confused”, The Virgin Suicides and tv-shows like Freaks and Geeksbut also more recent films such as Licorice Pizza and Ham on Rye. They wear football jerseys and pon pons, the jeans are dirty and worn in. Acne and ERL present a universe and a nostalgia for a place very far from school shootings, pandemics, and crisis. The genuine enthusiasm and naivity of Michelle in “American Pie” going “One time, at band camp”.

Perhaps, as an article in The Guardian suggests, there is “the intimidated potential listener who wants the music world to be demystified”. Tiktok can help provide this. As the students reacting to Kpop, the London Philharmonic similarly have open themselves up to dialogue around classical music, what playing different instruments is like and, of course, posting a variety of pieces, from The Lord of the Rings film score to Mozart’s clarinet concerto.

If classical music is indeed finding new ways of merging with pop culture, it is in ways that demands the purists to take a step back. For it isn’t only in the concert halls or through the technical skills of immensely talented musicians that music is enjoyed, but through humour, play and connection. A simple hat that says “Mozart” suddenly carries a bit more weight and offers a way in for new generations to embrace classical music in a way that means something to them.