EQ Fashion Experts: Teach Me How Fashion Works

[loramin]

TLDR; I'm looking for a breakdown of how to differentiate/group wearable items by their appearance.

Awhile back people requested a fashion site, so I started working on a crawler that could find the fashion data for P99 items. At first I thought it was simple: every item just has an appearance type (eg. "Kunark Chain" for fungi tunic). But then I looked at Allakhazam/Lucy's data, and there it seems every item has three things that could affect its appearance ...

• Appearance Type (eg. Chain)
• Era (eg. Kunark)
• Tint (eg. black, except in RGB form)

So, for instance, an Advisor Robe (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=2087) would have an appearance type of "Crimson Robe of Alendine", an era of "Original", and a tint of "#610d02".

However, I'm not sure if the era is even relevant or not. Some items (eg. fungi tunic) have an appearance type "Kunark Chain", while others just have "Chain". But there are a LOT of "Chain" items, and I don't think they all look the same, which is why I thought the era might matter. I'm also not sure if "Chain (from Kunark era)" is even different from "Kunark Chain", or whether that's just poorly-entered data.

If I was more familiar with items and their appearances I could probably draw some conclusions, but since I've never been big on fashion I can't. So, can any fashion experts explain how many different "axis" of fashion differentiation there are for a given item, and what they are (type/era/tint or type/tint or ?) Also, does anyone have an opinion on the quality of Allakhazam/Lucy's fashion data, or have a suggestion for a better source?