The way I understood Yoshi-P's answer, is that the hempen set is actually still tagged as some sort of underwear (sort of a relic from 1.0, when it was the default underwear). It's possible that this tag is what causes the item to have a different model when worn by different races, even the ones that got introduced with 2.0 and 3.0.
A way to get around this (and probably a work-intensive way), is to recreate each hempen style as a separate item, and modeling it to each race's model.

As for "get better translators", that notion is kinda silly, considering Koji was doing the translating during the live letter.