Yup unfortunately it is a lot of work. Cloth sims are not very real time friendly, normally you would only use it for bits like capes and stuff. I have seen versions that used morphs like morph from a T-shirt to a Polo Shirt etc. but to do that you have to have a lot of verst to make it convincing as the same verts have to make every shape.
I just had a look at one of our last characters (for a sports game with long and short sleeves, caps, helmets, 3 types of shoes, gloves etc.) it was 181 meshes.
We used a XRef of the skeleton in every part file and lots of skin weighting coping and pasting etc. 
you can make it easier in the Blueprint/Code to instantiate the mesh parts if you use really good naming conventions. I cannot stress enough that you put a lot of thought into the naming conventions…