Clothing... a simple solution would be to take two pieces of clothing to a street vendor and apply the visuals of one to the stats of the other. It gives the vendors more purpose, allows for the 'hodge podge of immediately useful stats', along with the deliberate application of style, at a delay.
This seems far better to me than some of the other suggestions (e.g. applying a clothing item as a visual and another as a stats 'live' in the inventory, in that you have a cash sink.
Appearance changes should also be available from the ripper doc. No reason you can't change tatoos/piercings/eye colour if you are doing all the other mods.
