skinned cloth a new mesh or alter a preexisting mesh?

So I have a character with a kind of cape already modelled, and when I import it into unity, I’d like to change part of the cape into a skinned cloth, so that it interacts like cloth. Will the Skinned Cloth component provide a new mesh that I then attach to the character, or will it simply adjust the vertices of the model at runtime?

http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Components/class-SkinnedCloth.html