The personal-style mavens at Chictopia have signed onto a partnership with hipster heaven American Apparel. Three of Chictopia’s top-rated fashionistas are posing for an ad campaign for American Apparel, to debut next month.

The models were selected from the site’s users who have posted photos of themselves and earned the highest rankings from viewers. However, Jezebel has concerns because this “real girl” ad campaign seems a bit disingenuous:

The company’s hipster girl-next-door aesthetic was fine and good, and its claim to never airbrush its advertising is refreshing, if true. For a while, American Apparel’s ads seemed kind of like the company’s wares: basic, cute, cheeky, cool. There was none of the aspirationalism of mainstream fashion, and that was nice. American Apparel, a purveyor of dependable cotton garments that don’t change much from season to season, didn’t position itself as a fashion brand and wasn’t taken as one. The whole point was that they didn’t have to sell us on their products with lavish, fantastical ads with otherworldly imagery, because the clothes were good, the clothes were needed, and the clothes were inexpensive.

But then their ads started getting sexier and sexier, the female bodies in them became perkier, less blemished, and thinner, and they were shot in ever more compromising positions (not so the dudes, unfortunately) and all around the company set about becoming exactly the same kind of aspirational pseudo-fashion mall brand as anything else. The “real people” thing became a vestige of the old way of doing things that had the advantage of also cutting costs.

It’s admittedly more refreshing than American Apparel’s other new ad blitz (site NSFW), but what do you think? Is American Apparel being cheeky or chintzy?