Colonists gripe about tattered clothing, but only put on new item if forced?

[Chibiabos]

Is this intentional?

If I force them to remove it, they won't replace it, unless I unforbid the tattered item they just removed, in which case they'll just put on the tattered item :/

There are 100% unused items of that clothing type available, but they won't go and put them on :/

[Riddle78]

The other clothing items might be tainted (Removed from a corpse),or simply might not be in the list of allowed articles in the currently assigned outfitting rules.

[Pangaea]

That can be a pain for sure. One way to handle it is to change the Apparel rules. You can disallow tainted apparel (worn by corpses), and set the percentage to 50-100%. Just make sure you have enough backup, so they don't start wandering around naked.

[Limdood]

colonists will prefer the highest stat items:

-if you have an undamaged cloth t-shirt, and the pawn is wearing a 12% alpaca wool button down shirt...the button down shirt has better insulation, so the pawn will wear it.  Same thing with item quality.  A pawn will prefer a 8% tainted "excellent" cloth duster over a 95% "normal" cloth duster.

As Pangaea said, assigning outfits is definitely a good idea.  Notably restricting the hit points, and disallowing tainted apparel.  One slight correction is that you want the hit point slider set to 51%-100%...since 50% clothing counts as tattered...it's a tiny overlap, but man it gets annoying when pawns keep putting on the same stupid 50% shirt.

[Pangaea]

Haven't had that issue, but yes, then it's better to set it to 51%.

Similarly, I have a few bills for flak vests and such, and have it so that if I have 3 or less of 55%+ quality, new ones will be made. So a bit more leeway there.

[Limdood]

I started using "mend and recycle" mod - the fact that vanilla Rimworld doesn't let you FIX regular clothing (but we can build a spaceship) or even rip apart clothing to get some of the cloth back is frankly unacceptable to me.  It's one of my top 5 "can't live without" mods...in fact it's probably #2, right behind Stack XXL.

Works pretty well....adds a "recycle apparel" bill to the tailor bench that lets you break down apparel to a small portion of it's base cost.  It also adds a "mending bench" and options in the mod settings to have the mending bench require power or not, to have mending apparel or weapons require "mending kits" (a craftable item) or nothing, whether or not mending items removes the "tainted" tag, and the chance of "failing" to mend a given item. 

IMO, it makes managing outfits so much easier...I just set my mending bench to repair everything non-tainted (i don't turn on "remove tainted"), and set my tailoring benches to recycle tainted apparel, as well as making bills for each type of clothing my colonists wear (usually pants, duster, button down shirt, cowboy hat) to "produce until you have [1]."  Then whenever some apparel decays to 50%, the colonist will take it off, put on the spare, and carry on with their day, while some crafter will come and repair the damaged one, making it the new spare.  Whenever I recruit someone, there is already a full set of clothing ready for them to put on, and since I will no longer have the 1 piece of clothing specified in the bills, my crafters will automatically start crafting a new set of spare clothes.

[Pangaea]

That does sound pretty useful, especially for truly rare apparel like masterwork marine helmet and the like. But don't you just end up with more materials than you'll ever need? That's already the case for me. One mass animal insanity attack, and there is enough material for years. Small patch of cotton, and you suddenly have thousands of cloth. A few muffalos or alpacas, and you have wool up to the rafters (which is incidentally why I tend to kill off all the males, to prevent breeding out of control).

Does make sense that we should be able to fix clothes ofc, but I suspect it has been done like this for balancing purposes.

As a related point, I'm a bit confused why people don't automatically put on normal and good marine armour in my current game. Surely the protection must be better than good to excellent flak vest+pants. Even have a bunch of rhino pants (see point about animal insanity) that people don't use, and devilstrand button-down shirts. Pawns don't always make the expected decisions.

[Canute]

But don't you just end up with more materials than you'll ever need?

Hehe, yes you do, special later once you crafter made enough high quality stuff he just need to repair after a raid.
But the worst part are, you have ton's or small quality resources from all the salvaged clothes. Basicly you have from each kind of leather a small stack.
Mosttime i let some unskilled pawn's made patched leather out of leather i don't want and/or sell these to any visitor/trader who accept them.