I doubt there is any proper research available, because it seems doomed from the start to me.

The first problem is how fast fashion nowadays is. We often have multiple collections per year.
The moment you‘ve collected the required data, drawn conclusions, peer reviewed and published it, said data is already outdated because the companies have produced a new collection.
It‘s just not repeatable that way.

Another problem is that said brands produce the same item in many locations, to sell in yet another different location, but sometimes production quality can differ between those individual factories.

You also have a problem with sample size and how to choose companies.
There is a lot of competition in clothing companies, which means a vast sample size is needed to adequately represent „high quality“ vs „cheap“.
You also need to choose whether to include one or multiple items per company.

For example: do I choose only one pair of jeans from company X to represent the quality of that company? And what if they produce multiple different jeans?

Since you want to compare „high quality“ vs „cheap“, that also means your little study is gonna cost you a lot of money just to aquire the sample items.

Another problem that I imagine could arise is that wear and tear on clothes can be simulated by different mashines, but that must not translate perfectly into real life.

For example, let’s say item X has better seams in general than item Y and only a few seams of Y are better on average. Now imagine that particular place that tends to rip more often for customers is the one that‘s better in item Y, just because said customers tend to do certain motions more often. They will notice that item X is less reliable than Y, even though it has better seams for the most part.

That‘s a problem that you could fix by handing out clothes to groups of people (aka participants) and interviewing them over a long period of time. Which would bloat the study even more and require much more money, because now you‘re looking for participants in a longitudinal study.

Another problem is not only the different ways people use the same item of clothing (for example I tend to sit in the so called lotus position a lot in my jeans, because it‘s comfy. This means the seam at my crotch needs to hold under more tension than when I sit straight at a table), but also the different ways people wash and store their clothes.
Tumble drier? Hanged for drying? Folded in the closet? Not folded? Rolled?