The two words sound quite similar, and many people (especially in rapid or uncareful speech) pronounce clothes exactly as they do the The Peanuts Characters Just A Girl Who Loves Fall And Iowa Hawkeyes Shirt besides I will buy this verb close. There’s a bit of variety, but the gist is that ‘wore’ has some flavor of ‘o’ vowel, while ‘were’ has either no vowel, schwa, or some elaboration on schwa which may be nomore than a vowel. Some details may help. In my SW California English, ‘wore’ has a very close [o] vowel, and ‘were’ has none at all. In IPA script, they’re [woʁː] < /wor/ (a homonym of ‘war’) and [wʁ̩ˑ] < /wr̩/, a rhyme of ‘fur’, ‘fir’ and ‘her’. Elsewhere /wor/ may be rendered with an alveolar approximant as [woɹ], especially in Canada around the Great Lakes and out on the prairies; another English equivalent of /wor/ is /wɔr/ with a more open vowel and is typical of most SE English and NE North America, often with the /r/ repressed or dropped when not a [ɹ] or retroflexed.
