Remove/hide geometry from animated avatar

I have an asset package that I imported from the store.

The third person character is fully animated and I'm trying to to remove an accessory from the model.

I've tried these 3 things so far working with the base fbx file:

1) Deleting the points of the accessory's geometry
2) Deleting just the faces
3) Creating a selection tag for the accessory geometry and assigning a separate material

All of these options cause the animation to break in the game. I've contacted the developer as well, but haven't gotten a reply.

Does anybody know of a possible solution to this? Is there some way to assign an invisible material to specific geometry of a given model that has animation assets associated with it?

 

Actually just figured it out. I was able to replace the Mesh reference in the 'Skinned Mesh Renderer' module nested within the prefab which allowed me to use an edited mesh without breaking the animations: