Hi guys,
We would love to be able to offer customizable clothing styles and individual pieces. It would certainly drive more avatar business in the Pro Shop and we would not be against that. The reason we haven't yet is unfortunately a technical one.
Basically when you are looking at your avatar you're actually looking at 2 embedded video objects. Your 1-piece avatar is essentially one video (complete with ani's) and your club is the 2nd video (also complete with ani's). Each article of individual clothing requires its own embedded video object and its own animation set. At this time a large amount of players would not be able to handle 6 or 7 different video objects and their animations running simultaneously on the screen. For most it would drag playback down to a crawl because the sheer amount of things going on at one time will wreak havoc on the frame rates of all but the best video cards. Try playing 3 or 4 flash videos on your PC at the same time and you'll see what I mean.
It's something we'd definitely like to do at some point. As I said customization is a big thing and people love to do that kinda stuff, but right now it would create mostly undesirable results. Bummer, I know, but one day perhaps. =)