My wardrobes suddenly are only showing the options to 'change into' and for community lots, 'buy' and 'try on', but no 'plan outfit'. It seems to be since I added the Sim Boutique Clothingrack, but it doesn't make sense why it would cause this. I just downloaded and ran the Sims 2 Hack Conflict Detection Utility from simwardrobe. It gave me 3 possible mod conflicts which I've fixed but hasn't changed this particular issue.

Logical question - did you remove the clothing rack and see if that fixes the problem?

Also, a quick look at the comments for that download shows that it's not certain if it plays well with Apartment Life. Someone had problems with it changing the apartment doors and making neighbors unselectable. It's not clear if that was ever solved or not, but I'd bet it wasn't.

Yes I did remove it.

does the family have more then one outfit for the age and gender? is it only one family? is it only one hood? have you tried buying more clothes?

It seems to be happening only with my main sim/household, but I can't get it to reverse. She can't even plan her outfits on a community lot.

Did you try resetting her? Sometimes my Sims stop having the option to do things (like wash dishes), and resetting them with Force Error resolves it.

I had her ask her boyfriend to move in, which seems to have fixed it. Weird. Such a shame I can't keep the rack, I was using it to edit NPC outfits.

There's more than one hack that will do that. Christian Love's Gussy Up plug-in was made pre-Seasons, but it works well with my All-EP game. And there are other clothing racks out there. Keep looking - you'll find the right one for you.

Oh, awesome. I've searched around a lot but I got the impression that changing NPC clothes was difficult as I could find hardly anything for it.