It's not so much that 'clothing shortages' represented a real struggle that the anarchists of the late 19th century sought to overcome; clothing was not in scarce supply. But neither was housing nor food. That's precisely the point Pyotr Kropotkin is trying to make though: there were plenty of houses, plenty of food, and plenty of clothing. So why then, are there so many people without adequate supplies of one or more of them? Why must some people rent single-room flats while their landlords own entire tenements? Why must some go hungry while others grow fat? Why should a noble wear the finest silks, new each day, while the peasant across town recycles his single coat throughout the week? Thus--to Kropotkin-- the inherent problem is not the frequency of these items in society but rather their distribution that ought to be confronted.

Consider how Engels approached the issue of housing in his 1872 The Housing Question:

[O]ne thing is certain: there are already in existence sufficient buildings for dwellings in the big towns to remedy immediately any real 'housing shortage,' given rational utilization of them. This can naturally only take place by the expropriation of the present owners and by quartering in their houses the homeless or those workers excessively overcrowded in their former houses. [1]

Now compare that to Kropotkin's writing in The Conquest of Bread in 1892:

The question of clothing will of course demand consideration next, and again the only possible solution will be to take possession, in the name of the people, of all the shops and warehouses where clothing is sold or stored, and to throw open the doors to all, so that each can take what he needs. The communalization of clothing-- the right of each to take what he needs from the communal stores, or to have it made for him at the tailors and outfitters-- is a necessary corollary of the communalization of houses and food. [2]

Indeed, if you read through the entire Clothing section (which I'm not suggesting you didn't), you might even notice the word 'shortage,' 'scarcity,' and other similar synonyms don't appear once! Quite the opposite in fact! Kropotkin's call to action sounds very similar to Engels' above: the problem isn't frequency, but distribution.

If we were to take an inventory of all the clothes and stuff for clothing accumulated in the shops and stores of the large towns, we should find probably that in Paris, Lyons, Bordeaux, and Marseilles, there was enough to enable the commune to offer garments to all the citizens, of both sexes; and if all were not suited at once, the communal outfitters would soon make good these shortcomings. We know how rapidly our great tailoring and dressmaking establishments work nowadays, provided as they are with machinery specially adapted for production on a large scale. [3]

So again, it's not that people were running around without clothes-- it's that some people had many, many clothes while others had just enough-- or indeed, were unable to afford enough. Kropotkin saw that as a serious form of injustice for which an anarchist revolutionary society would correct.