Costume redesigns - what sticks, what doesn't.

I wonder how much of this has to do, also, with what a character is wearing at a moment when their book gets a bunch of new readers. Thinking here of the X-Men circa the cartoon show, the action figures, and the speculator boom - all those Jim Lee (and maybe Portacio?) costumes seemed to me, coming on board at that time, as just what those characters' costumes were, and it was a long time before you could have convinced me that most readers would have read, say, Storm's white drapey thing as a dubious recent change and not just "Storm's costume." Also, of course, when characters have had more costume redesigns over their history, it decreases the sense that they even have a definitive look. Storm might actually be a good example.

An interesting take on this was Prime, as written by Gerard Jones and Len Strazewski and drawn by Norm Breyfogle, where the character's costume changes are part of an evidently planned two-year mega-plot, and symbolize how the adolescent boy who is secretly behind the Prime bodies (it's a Shazam-type premise) is trying out different identities for himself: generic hero, a "rebel" persona that becomes quickly and appropriately cringe-worthy, etc. Tbh they could have done much more with this, but it's a cool idea.