We all know that as you increase the level of an item you "enhance" it's appearance. At Veteran levels, most gear looks almost entirely different from that first level 1 piece you made.

The problem here, is that not everyone wants to have their gear "enhanced" because they're a higher level.

My khajiit templar for example, wears a medium argonian chest-piece as part of his RP set... Between level 10 and level 20 that piece changed for the worse, leading me to wear a level 10 chest piece from 20-29.

Because I'm sure I'm not the only one who likes to control my character's appearance as much as possible, my suggestion is this:

In the crafting menu, you can choose to use 1-4ish Crafting Style Items (Bone, Flint, Manganese, Moonstone, etc.)

1 Crafting Style Item will produce the basic appearance.
2 will produce the next "rank" of appearances in that style and so on.

Now to prevent people from crafting "epic looking armor" right off the bat, the "ranks" could be tied into a Passive Crafting Skill, or they could just unlock as normal - new appearances being available at, for example, level 36, when my orc's Wood Elf Shoulders became the awesome ?rhino?-skull pieces.

I feel like it's a pretty simple fix to a crafting system that has a couple odd holes in it, and I'm sure everyone, roleplayers and non-roleplayers alike, would love the flexibility it could bring to our appearances.