Thank you, my princess shall go and investigate.
I agree with you about tieing clothing status with HP being cheap design, but correct me if I am wrong, the game doesn't exactly do that.
Once your health drops, the protection of your clothing wears down, which kind of makes sense (battle wear and all that). If the clothing status drops to a certain level, you get a yellow buff (I can't tell what it's called, it doesn't get translated with AGTH). If clothing wears even further down, you get a red buff. Both buffs remain for the duration of the battle, even if you heal yourself. They disappear once you leave the battle, which again makes kind of sense (the princess has time to rearrange/fix her clothes). I assume that the red buff gives a significant bonus to enemies to have fun with the princess.
I can only guess from what I see happening in-game, but if I am correct, I thought this system to be rather clever. Better than a "have to walk around naked till you can buy sewing kits or whatever" system, and definitely an improvement over a basic "fix your clothes with a healing spell" system, yeah.