OK, since in the SR4 gear chapter, it lists cloths as 20 Nuyen to 10,000 Nuyen, and does not give a nice neat formula for what is what..

It would be nice if we had some guidelines for how much different sets of clothes would cost. You know: what is 20 Nuyen? 100 nuyen? 500 nuyen? 10,000 nuyen? What I have started doing for characters is a "clothing allotment" until there is something more clear cut on that. That, of course, is just me..but it would be nice to have a nice, objective standard.

Go off of real life.  20 dollar clothes come from Target, and 10,000 dollar clothes come from prestigious fashion designers, and are custom made for you.

Real life, though doesn't have things like ruthenium woven into the fabric, or AR over-lays or things like that.  That is kind of where I am getting curious on where things start getting their costs. The description of 'Clothing' in the gear section made it sound like there was alot more that could be done in SR than can be done today. And, with synthetic fibers, well..you can probably get the same texture or properties you want with a synthetic as you can with real fiber today, so..

I just like knowing if I made a character who had an dress for clubbing that was one of those tight FM red numbers, with an AR heat shimmer above it, and spots that would go from opaque to translucent in some pattern, would that be 10K, 500? 1K? 50 nuyen?

I can totally imagine that dress, and I can totally imagine some Ork bragging to his buddies that she left her AR-Icon panties in his sonic shower over a soy-beer.

There's no definite formula, you just have to use your imagination and judgment.  I think the price of something doesn't really speak to its features though - I bet you can get all kinds of AR enhanced clothing at 2070's Target for 20-50 yen, only it's from 2070's Target and anyone in the high class scene would laugh at you.  If you want to desc yourself as being fashionable, your clothes should be relatively expensive, like 300-800 yen or something.  If you want to be tres chic, 1000+.  If you want to be omgwtf movie star, 10k.  Though materials are part of it, the real price of clothing is the prestige it brings.  Anything that could be part of clothing which has a truly relevant game-changing effect, like a two-way transciever, subvocal microphone, sensors, etc, has a defined cost in the gear section, and you should pay for it seperately even if it's technically purchased as part of a garment.

The easy way would be to assume that everyone is "dressed" appropriately for the environment unless otherwise described. Would the average person would wear a 20 Yen outfit to go clubbing at Dante's? Would the average person wear a 1000 yen outfit to slum in Touristville? I think not.

Personally, I wish clothes were covered by lifestyle, with only specific fancy stuff not..but that is not how it is. I never liked having to buy all of a characters clothes, as it seemed way to micro-managment to me. However, the rules gave a much wider range then they used to, when there was something of a basic standard. I would like something simple like: exotic materials make it this much, AR stuff makes it this much, designer so-and-so makes it this much...but that is just me. If you are going to micromanage, do it right!