That's about the best way I can put it. I've been letting the game generate dormies, and finding out that all the clothing and hairs other than Everyday are completely grab-bag - that is, the game just grabs and plugs in without any concern for whether the clothing or hairs match the Everyday settings or not. Mostly they don't. (And yes, I looked through fifty pages of the help section and didn't find anything close to this.)

I have one male dormie who for Everyday has red hair in a ponytail with a green bandana, but when he's in the shower or walking around in his undies his hair is whacked off short. (These are both Maxis default files and they DO NOT go together.)

There's a female dormie whose Everyday is blonde hair tied up in a(nother) green bandana, but in the shower she has mousy-gray cornrows up in a topknot. (In the SHOWER???)

Edit: Some experimentation suggests that it was EAXIS who mis-assigned the hairs - this part of it is solvable by selecting a different hair style (make it one that looks good under most conditions).

As for the clothes:

It is NOT POSSIBLE to fix these problems using any mod that I have found - not Christianlov's Clothing Rack, not the "pile of clothes" outfit changer, not Sim Manipulator, not anything. There are no alternative choices, everything is greyed out. (Some of the mods FAKE a solution, but when I check, nothing has really been changed at all.)

And no, it does not matter whether the dormie is made selectable or not - selectable just makes fake-choosing easier and changes nothing.

Edit: It turns out that ANY attempt to reassign non-Casual clothing on a non-playable Sim by ANY method just deletes ALL non-Casual assigned clothing and replaces it with nothing. This was a known bug with SimSurgery - and apparently it is a bug that applies all the way across the board.

That's not even going into problems where the clothing choices (e.g. formals) are bizarrely inappropriate - I can "forbid" some outfits by recategorizing and/or de-townifying them, but it doesn't go to the root of the issue.

I see only two possible solutions, both closely related: Use the nodormiespawn hack and ONLY allow dormies that I custom-make (which puzzles me as to how to make them "dormies" then), and/or cycle the worst offenders through one or the other of the Greek houses long enough to get fixed (and then hopefully put them back where they were, which requires the nodormiespawn hack so nobody else steals their room).

There is a possible third alternative, but I am nowhere near good enough at using SimPE yet to know how to do that kind of manual fix (and there are no tutorials that specific that I have found).

I don't really know of a solution to your problem with changing the Dormie's clothes, however I can tell you how to make your own Dormies.

Make some Young Adult Sims in the Uni CAS and then make them Dormies, you can use argon's towniebrick and I think you can also use The Sim Blender, or The Sim Manipulator or The InSimenator, just select the YA Sim that you have in a dorm or house and then click on the object that you are trying to use and select to change them into a Dormie. It is not that hard just take a Playable YA Sim and select them and then click on argon's towniebrick or The Sim Blender, or The Sim Manipulator or The InSimenator choose the right part and then go to the Family section and the option to make them into a Dormie should be there. I am positive about argon's towniebrick, but not totally sure about The Sim Blender, or The Sim Manipulator or The InSimenator.

Some of the default maxis hairs don't have a naked/swim, undies or PJ category, and picks whatever hair it is linked to when the sim change to those categories. Could probably be fixed by a recategorizing mod that eliminates the "showerhead" hair change and sets the hair to work for all categories, though that is a lot of work. If you make CAS townies, you can control which hair they get for individual categories.

Townies and non-uniform NPCs in general have never been good at picking clothing options that actually work, so if it doesn't help with hiders or default replacements or towniefied clothes, or any of the clothing changing mods, custom making in CAS is probably the best option.

I have never had any problem assigning clothes or hairs for each stage to townies with Christian Love's Gussy-Up Plug-in. and making them selectable and sending them to the wardrobe and mirror should also work. Possibly you have a mod conflict messing you up.

Me either ^ You can find it updated on MidgeTheTree's Tumblr, now seasons enabled. But grab bag is what the game does, always has. Pretty sure the other sims games do that too.

This older little mod works great for non-uniform NPCs, might help with the others, but I haven't tried it for them. http://modthesims.info/download.php?t=76392
I use this and the Christianlov's Clothing Rack to change my NPCs clothes.

lordtyger9, thanks for the how-to on making own dormies - I'll probably have to do that hereafter.

simmer22: Un-messed-with dormies have a full set of (arbitrarily assigned) clothes, but once you try to change their wardrobe, the non-Everyday files are blasted into nonexistence and you can't restore them with anything but SimPE - if you're a real expert at SimPE. (Or by making them Greek and therefore playable.)

PeniGriffin: It might also be a version difference - I have the most recent Ultimate Collection (complete with the exasperating "feature" that keeps it slaved to Origin).

It occurs to me that the hat/hair tutorial might possibly be of some relevance, but - 25 files for each gender? (shudder!)

UC or disks doesn't matter. Again have you tried the updated closet gussy up by MidgeTheTree?

Just did. It doesn't work in my setup for whatever reason - too many clothing mods, incompatible with Ultimate Collection, I just don't know.

Gussy up gets added to each sims pie menu, it's a global mod. Nothing to do with the UC, the UC is simply all EP's and SP's, the same as all disks which I have.

I beg to differ about the Origin version of UC vs the disk version. There are differences, there have been patches since the last of the disks came out, and there have been updates to the Origin version even since that was introduced (one of the most recent made it impossible to play Sims2 without at least logging into Origin).

The mod may be incompatible with Sim Manipulator, which is on the whole more all-around useful, so if I have to choose....

This clothing thing is only an issue with dormies (and, probably, apartment-mates), and that only because they're around all the time - showering, sleeping, loafing around in PJs, etc - so any major discrepancy in clothing or hairstyle is quite noticeable.

Edit: I take it no one is sufficiently SimPE-savvy to know how to force a clothing change by using it. Disappointing, but not unexpected - it's a wicked little program with most of its features unexplained.

Your first post is a little confusing to me. Can you tell me one thing you exactly want to happen with the clothes that I can use as a test? I have not done this with dormies, but I have with NPCs. If I know what you want to happen, I can try the same techniques I used with NPCs to see if they work with dormies.

NOTE: I don't know how to fix the shower hair, but, personally, I'd like a global that stops them changing their hair in the shower and with pjs and stuff. Anyone know one?

My original gripe was about three dormies in particular:

1) A male who HAD a green bandana over a red ponytail when he was in Everyday wear, but when he was walking around in his undies, or in the shower, he had generic short hair. My earlier attempts to get this fixed resulted in losing his non-Everyday clothing information right out of his character file. Eventually I set him up with a "custom" hair that was red ponytail but no bandana, then forced him into the Greek frat (which made him playable, so FINALLY I could fix his wardrobe problem - it turned out the clothing information must have been stored somewhere else that I couldn't find, because the options I had selected for him that had NOT shown up in SimPE were among his wardrobe options when I used the Clothing Tool on him after making him Playable).

2) Another bandana problem, this one female with (what looked like long) blonde hair tied up in a green bandana - but in the shower she had a cornrowed topknot in a mousy ash shade. After the ponytail fiasco I wasn't going to mess with her wardrobe, but changed her hairstyle twice before I found one I liked (custom, of course - will have to check how it looks in the shower, which I haven't yet). (Edit: The hairstyle does not change. This is acceptable.)

3) There's another female dormie, very butch, and I thought it would be a hoot to assign her a "female tux" (custom content) for Formal wear. No can do, not so there's any record of it in SimPE or anywhere in-game. No can change non-Everyday outfits by ANY MEANS WHATSOEVER. No can do nuthin'. I gave up.

The only way I could make visible wardrobe changes, and make them stick, was to force the Sim into Playable status - Selectable will not do it. Whether this is a bug specific to my setup, or something more universal, is more than I know.

Edit: I finally found out that the GussyUp mod cannot be used with the Clothing Rack - they interfere with each other. But even so I wasn't able to get the "Female Tux" on the Sim that I wanted to wear it. I wonder if there's something wrong with that particular skin?

I've had both of these mods in my game for some time now and have no problem using either one of them. I keep forgetting to remove the medieval Maxis Store stuff when setting up a new neighborhood, so I frequently have to use one of these mods to get townies to stop wearing chainmail for outerwear. I have a disk-based game, but I don't see why that would make a difference.

I agree with Peni that your problem sounds like a mod conflict. Does your game have the same problem when you remove your mods?

I agree with Peni sounds like you have a Problem Mod, I don't have this problem in my game. If they are not currently Selectable, I use Merola's Mirror to select them and then I use Pescado's Pile of Clothing Mod to change the Sim, it works fine with Playables, Townies, Downtownies, Dormies, NPCs, Garden Club Members, Vacation Locals and Tourists. I also have used ChristianLov's Clothing Rack. Never had a problem using either method.

I think it may be a problem skin. Will investigate that possibility further.

Edit: That appears to have been the answer. I recloned it through BodyShop, and then had no trouble assigning it.