DISCUSSION: Vanity display, what way would be best?

[TheLastProject]

Okay, I'll make it quick: The current way of listing vanity items is bad:

Especially with the quick growing of items right now, this is already on practically the limit of extensibility. Therefore, I wanted to move it to a new "tab" called "appearance".

My original design, already outdated, was like this:

However, as LuckyStrike told me fairly soon, the list can grow big enough to not make this feasible either. Therefore, I made a third mock-up:

(Imagine the vertical bar on the right not being there and stuff... working. Sliders are a complete hell for me)

However, I was wondering, is this what we want? In my view, the best thing would be a drop-down menu, but is that even possible to create?

So, long story short: If you would be asked to implement a menu for choosing your vanity items, how would you implement it, and why would you implement it this way?

[riidom]

I would do like this:

Same Models with different texture should appear same way as different models, so Hat (felt) and Hat (metal) just appear as 2 different items.
What is interesting though, is which items will go together and which not. And separating placement spots from the items that can go to spot XY should make this pretty clear.