I made a skeleton actor (from scratch, not a duplicate), and I have set it's outfit to farmers clothes.

But it won't wear what I have set it to wear, it just stands there with nothing on though it's inventory does contain the items (shown when killed) and it says it has them on currently.

I have seen mods with skeletons wearing things and there is even an outfit option for skeletons, though it won't work for them either.

Bump.

Maybe they need their own special model or something?

EDIT: Or, try to open up those mods you saw in the CK, and try to reverse-engineer how they did it?

... and it is not going to wear it. This is going to get confusing, but, the in-game skeleton model has its own skeleton (as in set of "bones") to which meshes are rigged to, and this set of bones is not the same set of bones to which the regular actors and the armors/clothes are rigged.

The only way to make a skeleton wear something, it would be to merge both skeleton and armor/clothing meshes in a 3D program (Blender, 3Ds, etc) and weight the armor/clothes to the set of bones that come with the skeleton.

... told you it was going to get confusing

clothing and armor need to specify which races are allowed to wear it.

i'm guessing by default farmers clothes are not flagged for skeleton race. you have to edit this manually

also, i don't think you need to tinker with the rig in a 3d editor, since some skelton models already can wear certain hoods which are rigged for human characters.

Well for Oblivion...what I remember was done was took a skeleton model and assign it to the ..i believe amulet slot...then make that slot occupy all body parts and wala..a skeleton/actor... I doubt that works anymore however

I haven't checked the nifs, but are you sure they are the same nifs as the ones humans wear?
Not saying that it's not possible they did that this time around, but all the other games, skeletons had their own bone structure.

i imported a draugr skeleton in 3ds max and they share the same rig as a human, which means all the armor nodes will work on a skeleton body. you just have to make sure the armor piece itself can support a skeleton race. if not, you set it manually

Well, there was an outfit "SkeletonImperialHelmet" which I assumed would work for the skeleton, but that didn't work.

Have you already tried to put armor/clothes on a skeleton? Did it work?