To be honest the only clones I see running around this game are the annoyingly unoriginal miqote or hyur girls who run around in bikinis and long hair with absolutely no originality as they do not use some of the cool looking armor sets available.
However that being said, I love the idea of race specific gear. In a game where you have different races, it is nice to have unique items/hairstyles/facial features pertaining to each race so they may remain unique. I think that is where this game is lacking ATM, many races aren't looking unique enough from one another. However, they aren't clones either. I understand the concern that the OP has that every time a new hairstyle is released for a particular race, it is then made available to all the other races the following patch. Perhaps this should change in the future and do what they did first patch where they make a few new general hairstyles available to everyone and create unique hairstyles for each race and simply keep it available only to them.