Replacing a Clothing Model with an Armor Model

[MistahCheese]

I'm trying to replace the models (and textures and specular maps and such) of the jester set with those of the Nightingale set, because Nightingale looks extremely awesome but sucks for my build, and the Jester set looks meh but is amazing for my build. It seemed like it would be pretty easy, just overwrite the Jester assets with Nightingale assets, but when I tried to do that, I found that clothing assets are stored differently than armor assets (the Jester set is clothing while the Nightingale set is armor). First, armor is stored in male and female sub-folders, while all clothing assets are stored in the same folder (this isn't a problem, just odd). Then it gets very weird. For each gender, there are two armor assets for each piece (for example, gauntlets_0.nif and gauntlets_1.nif) and for gauntlets and torsos viewed in first-person. For clothing, there are two assets per piece per gender, but there is also a _go asset (e.g. jesterboots_go.nif). Then there are a ton of assets for the hat. I treid replacing a few of them with their nightingale counterparts, but that did absolutely nothing. I'm totally baffled. Anyone know how this works?

[MistahCheese]

Whoops, this is in the wrong section. Please lock, reposting in the right place this time.