Multiple animated sprites best practice

[Jcc10]

I was wondering what the best practice would be for the following situation in a multiplayer game:

Each player has a choice of base sprites and multiple stuff they can wear, (arbitrary amount of possibility's but limited slots for use) I was wondering what the "best practice" would be for this situation. I obviously can not per-render every combination so it has to be in some way or another dynamic.

I was wondering if there is a way to flatten a set of sprites into one for the sake of rendering since the animations for all of them are going to be in the same places on the raw images. This would probably also make synchronizing animations easier then having multiple sprites.

[Jcc10]

I must apologize for the shit example images but the idea would be to select a base sprite:

then have (a) add-on image(s):

And dynamically generate a single image from the two. Example processed image:

However I don't know if this is possible.