The status conferred through clothing is not determined by anything so objective as fit or so friendly as self-expression. It is determined entirely by the people who see you. If your peers/coworkers/friends happen to think Armani is cooler, anything else would be an eccentricity. (This is why anyone with sense eventually converges on casual clothing.)

I think that’s the difference between fashionable and stylish. There are a lot of fashionable people, and it’s relatively easy to become one. You need to have some aesthetic sense, but 90% of that can be outsourced if you have the money. You simply buy entire outfits from high fashion companies, and make sure they fit you well enough to look good. Do that often enough that your clothes are always up to date, and you’re fashionable.

Stylish, though, is much harder to attain. A truly stylish person can look incredible in clothes they bought at the Goodwill, because they have an aesthetic sense potent enough to create visually pleasing combinations that are actually novel. A good example of someone like this is Tavi Gevinson. If you’re not familiar, she started a fashion blog called The Fashion Rookie at age 11, and she caught the attention of the fashion world by styling inexpensive clothing in novel and interesting ways.

The designer ones can also be tailored, though.

I'm probably dating myself by saying that I used to work at Barney's New York when there was only a Barney's New York (the Womens's Store was still being built).

The first stop the salesmen (they were all male) took the customers to after picking out their suits was to the tailor (Attila on my floor) to get them altered for a perfect fit, which was included in the price.

Of course I get your point about cost effectiveness, but the average person dropping a few k on a single item of clothing really doesn't care about that.

This is what the subreddit mentioned in the article sort of "discovered"; they spend a lot of time obsessing over the details and subtle variations they can get by working directly with factories and artisans in China. By using a real design as a template they cut out the difficult part of designing the whole concept from scratch and can work from a template but still achieve quality with some minor tailoring.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

Signaling. If you buy LV therefore you're rich.

The signalling works differently depending on who you are.

In my case, if someone has a LV (or similar) bag/purse etc. I have no interest in interacting with them.

Interestingly, this 'signal' applies whether the bag is real or a cheap knockoff - I don't need to check whether the item is genuine, I assume I want to avoid interaction in both cases.