In 0.15.0 you could change the default "Steve" skin to a custom skin, which was pretty much useless (like the splash potion of leaping in single player survival) , then 0.15.9 rolled out and brought capes, and you could use resource packs to put your skin on the cape, then 0.15.10 rolled out and you could still do it but there wasnt alot of people stopped using capes (probably because they where using apks, a modded client, or toolbox/block launcher which you cant have capes on, or (going by what a pop up would say if you booted up mcpe with a cape skin on in toolbox) they didnt want to buy capes), however when capes came to 0.16.0 in the beta and in the current release of the 0.16.0 alpha if you tried it by replacing the steve.png in the vanilla and "skins" resource packs with a custom skin it would still be steve instead of the custom skin in the menus and ingame however the Steve Head (found in the creative menu) would be changed to the skin that replaced the steve.png without the hat layer

Screen shots not available at the moment because i dont know what would be applicable