Difference between clothes and clothing

What’s the difference between “clothes” and “clothing”?Can they be used interchangeably?
Thanks in advance!

Hi,

‘Clothes’ refers to individual items that you wear. You pack your clothes in a bag/case before you go away (on holiday).

‘Clothing’ is the collective noun for all sorts of clothes as in ’ Women’s/ Men’s Clothing department’ in a shop/store.

You could compare these two words with ‘shoes’ suggesting individual shoes/pairs of shoes and ‘footwear’ as the collective noun.

Alan

Thank you so much for such a quick reply.
Does the sentence " I like simple hardwearing clothing" make sense?

do you mean…hardware…hard wear…hard wire…hard where…?

“Hardwearing” means resistant to extensive wear; durable: a pair of hardwearing jeans.

I think it should be [color=blue]hard-wearing (notice the hyphen in between)…

thanks for sharing a new compound word…

According to Dictionary.com, this word is spelled together, however i do believe that both variants are possible. Thank you as well)