Hi! Thanks for coming at this in good faith, something a lot of people are strangely unable to do

Tons of factors influence pricing of clothing, a simple one to understand would be production (both who is producing it and what it's made of). A piece of clothing made by children in China is going to be much cheaper than a piece of clothing made by fairly paid adults in Japan or Sweden or something. A coat made of polyester is going to be cheaper than a coat made of vicuña wool. It's called overhead, which more or less means the overall price of creating something, with all things like materials and labor factored in. There was a leather jacket maker I used to like that could sell high quality leather jackets for about half the price of what they'd cost if manufactured by a designer simply because it was just a small group of dudes making them and taking orders, it just came at the cost of long wait times because they don't have a huge team of people creating jackets that they need to pay.

Less clear factors are things like design, exclusivity, etc. People buy a Louis Vuitton bag for the LV printed all over it, you can copy designs in fashion but logos are protected by copyright law, which is why LV does this, to make them hard to fake. People want things like this as a status symbol, and while these things do have high production value they still wouldn't be worth their price tag if all you factored in was labor and materials. Exclusivity is something people pay for, I'm not a big fan of the mindset but I can completely understand why people do this. Design is another thing, designer fashion is often ripped by fast fashion stores like zara or h&m but the design is rarely if ever as good, plus the quality is such that it will fall apart within a few years and retain absolutely no retail value whatsoever. I'd rather have something with an extremely unique design that also has a very high production quality and was made by well paid adults living in first world nations rather than contribute to child labor. I also like that if I ever get bored of something, I can quickly and easily resell it for a lot of money, I've actually made money off of a lot of the clothing I've bought and sold.

It's completely fine if you don't care about how you look, but in dressing that way you're still making a statement, that statement being "I don't care about how I look". Nobody is free of fashion regardless of how badly they'd like to disagree, how you dress says something about how you think or feel because you made the conscious decision to put those clothes on. I'd rather the clothes I wear say positive things about me, since an ugly truth of the world is that everybody is judging you based on how you present yourself physically.

I'm tired as hell so I probably neglected to mention things I otherwise would have, but hopefully this provided at least a little bit of insight