I have a broad question regarding the design of the product/variant model for retailers who have a lot of color and size variations by product.

A bit of context:

• for retailers, especially in clothing/fashion industries, we often ends up with hundreds of variants for a given product (ex: 10 sizes x 15 colors). As with the foundation example, we traditionally have one "master" product that contains information such as the description, and under it we have all the color/size variants that represent the SKUs (price , inventory, etc ). 
• In a category page (product listing), and on a search page,the requirements are usually to display a product tile for every color.l available for the product.
• In the retail/fashion industry, we often see all the colors listed in the category page, even though they are all listed on the same product page.  However, the URL would be different for every color.
• In search/category pages, the products can be filtered by color.
• Ideally, product images would be managed only "at the color level". I'd be interested to see what are the recommendations here to manage product images per color only (images don't change per size).

I would like to know what are the community best practices to handle product and variants in this case, and what would be the best model (ex: product/variant , product/product/variant, etc).

Thank you in advance for your help!