The way I would do it :
FIRST a baseline of wood-stone-copper-iron-silver-gold-titanium-gem-umbris/blink/rift pieces of armors, each with maybe 3 tiers.*
You’d obviously need a new UI with slots to put the armor pieces in. For the helmets, their appearances would be added to the current helmet lists in our Outfit menu in the Inventory menu, and you’d still be able to mix 3 appearances at once.
THEN, every so often, they add some cosmetic armors to the Exchange that could be bought with cubits, that could override the regular baseline appearances. This would require a tab to equip the armors and a tab to select other appearances.
For this, they’d also have to expand the Exchange helmet collection into a new menu where you’d select which type of slot you wanna buy stuff for and then you see the related appearance list.
But they could also do it in the other order. First work on the appearance part and THEN release the craftable armors.
*But it’s also a good question to ask why armors should follow the same style as tools/weapons. Maybe the first tiers of armors could be made with leaves and wood, and then you’d have some tiers that require cloth and leather, and then some others that require creature trophies and give different bonuses. I’d love to explore that further.
Point is, whenever they release something like that, it’s gonna be A HUUUUUGE change because they’ll need quite a bit of player-character-model rework, GUI-rework and lots of gameplay changes as well if they do add craftable armors that impact the other game-mechanics.
They might want to release some big UI improvements before or at the same time. There was something planned about a year ago. I heard it from James in February but nothing since :
Oh boy, that has been my #1 request for a long while :