Much of what is known about the xicolli in specific visual detail comes from the illustrations accompanying Sahagun's Florentine Codex, produced under his direction by Nahua artists working from living memory and older pictorial conventions in the decades after the conquest, which depict priests of different ranks and different deity cults wearing recognizably varied versions of the garment, some plainer, some marked with additional painted or woven elements signaling a wearer's specific office or the god he served. These variations indicate that the xicolli functioned as more than a generic priestly uniform, carrying finer distinctions of rank and specialization legible to contemporaries even where the surviving textual descriptions do not always spell out every distinction explicitly.
As with most specifically religious Aztec dress, the xicolli did not survive as a living garment past the disruption of the temple system that produced it, and its detailed reconstruction today depends on the colonial-era textual and pictorial record rather than on any continuous tradition of manufacture and wear.