Skin disapears after dieing or going through portal

Duplicate of MC-99

In fact a new issue of 14w19a.

In 14w19a, every time you go through a portal, the skin reverts to Steve.

It's unfixed in 14w20a.

Recently noticed this on my small private server (~10 friends play on it.) World was generated with snapshot version 14w11b. Skin issue happens on every time for me on 14w19a after using a portal (nether or ender) or respawning from death. Issue happens in both creative and survival modes. I have not tested Adventure mode, and I'm not sure how I would test this in Spectator mode.
Logging out and back in refreshed the skin correctly. Tested with default resource pack as well as a few custom ones.
Also test on a freshly generated 14w19a single player world with same results. (I just test with 14w20a and the issue still remains.)
I should also note that my friends said my skin looked fine to them, but on my end it was a distorted Steve skin. The same appears to be true the other way around- my friends said their skins were distorted Steve skins but they appeared fine on my end.

In case it matters, I tested this on Windows 7 (.exe game file) with Oracle Java 8 using the latest AMD Catalyst beta driver, and also Ubuntu Linux 14.04 (.jar game file) with Oracle Java 8 and the open-source RadeonSI driver.
My friends confirmed the same thing with Nvidia drivers on Windows 7 (I'm not sure what driver version they used or what Java version.)

Confirmed for 14w20b.

As far as I can tell, here's what happens:
The game communicates with the skins server ONCE AND ONLY ONCE – when you first join the server. If you die, take a trip to the Nether/End, or need to completely reload your UI for ANY REASON AT ALL, the game doesn't communicate with the server and reload your skin again. Thus, you get stuck with the default "steve.png" skin for your texture pack.
This only seems to happen CLIENT-SIDE, as other people can see your skin just fine regardless of where you wander to or how many times you die. (Probably due to how the game handles remote skins or something). I'm not entirely sure why it tries to read steve.png as a 64x64 file even if it's 64x32 however, since 64x32 skins work just as fine as 64x64 ones...

My question is why doesn't the local game client keep your skin loaded into memory at all times? It's not like it can change without you closing the game down entirely. Ever since there's been custom skins, if you die or warp to another dimension, your skin has to reload. I never understood it. It baffles me to this day and seems inefficient...

Fixed in 14w21a.