Along this same line, I believe that faded/worn jeans came into fashion about 5-10 years after clothes became affordable enough that all but the poorest of the poor could afford them. So new clothes stopped being a status symbol, and when the first generation of people that didn’t grown up with “old clothes = poor” got to the age to buy their own clothes, pre-faded/pre-damaged jeans became popular.
In addition, old/distressed jeans aren’t functionally different from new one.
Cars, OTOH, will likely always be something that you have to be reasonably well off to buy new, and an old car has a lot more functional damage than an old pair of jeans does.
I game into this thread to mention guitars. Not just their relic’ed base models, but signature models (the Yngvie Malmsteen and David Gilmour models) that replicate the wear on the personal guitars of well-known players.