Rigging mesh to other objects, without bones? (noob)

Is there a way to make the vest follow the character animation that doesn’t use armature/bones?
Something like ‘mesh deform’ that works outside ‘edit mesh’?
image

hi,
what you can try out,
in geometry-node you can connect multiple geometry to one new objeckt
which you than use to deform the vest,
Because your source ist splitt in more than one elements

I have not tried now if you can simply deform the vest also with several meshdeformers, it probably works too

deformer-gemmetry_nodes.blend (1.5 MB)