clothing <-> clothes

I've see widespread use of the namespace clothing:, however, outside of that namespace, clothes seems to be the preferred term with many [adjective] clothing being sibling'd to [adjective] clothes e.g:

• torn clothes
• chinese clothes
• clothes lift
• erection under clothes

is this intended for the purpose of distinguishing the namespace from general tags, or is it better to just set a global standard for these synonyms?