Clothing
From the OblivioWiki – your guide to everything Oblivion
Marks an article as requiring expansion and adds it as a stub.[edit] Clothing Basics
Oblivion uses a new system for 'dressing' the character. Essentially, every body part is replaced with the clothing item you equip. This is a departure from Morrowind. In that game, one was able to equip clothing based on where they were worn.
In a nutshell, in Morrowind, clothing was 'layered' on your character. For example, you could wear a shirt (chest item), with a cuirass on top of it (chest item). Similarly, You could wear greaves (leg item) and pants (also a leg item). Finally, you could toss a robe on to cover everything.
In Oblivion, the relevant body part is actually swapped out. So when you 'wear' a shirt, your chest is replaced with the shirt mesh. When you wear pants, your legs are replaced with the pants mesh. This means it is not possible without running user modifications to wear a shirt AND cuirass as the last piece equipped replaces anything previously equipped in the slot.
One user mod that exists currently allows you to wear a robe over the top of armor. It can be found on TESNexus' website under the Items, Objects and Clothes section. Link to the clothing mod file created by Lethos. It still has quite a lot of issues with clipping, though.
