The jacket had already lived one whole career before he put it on. Black leather, cut close, a Harley-Davidson label somewhere inside the collar — the kind of jacket that gets broken in by wear rather than styling, creased at the elbows in a pattern no costume department could fake convincingly. Sombr wore it on the MTV VMAs stage in September 2026, walking past screens playing footage of the man who'd actually worn it: George Michael, on the 1988 Faith tour, decades before its second owner was born.
Sombr — Shane Boose, twenty-one, raised on the Lower East Side by a father who ran an event-production company and a mother who worked in publicity — built his own career almost entirely without reference to the eighties. His breakout songs sound like bedroom recordings that escaped into arenas: unpolished, confessional, closer to Jeff Buckley than to any synth-pop revival. He belongs to the TikTok cycle, not the MTV one. Which is what made the borrowed jacket, worn to sing "Faith" and "Father Figure" as part of a tribute marking the album's fortieth year, something other than nostalgia dressing. He wasn't imitating an era he'd studied. He was wearing an object that predated him, on a body it was never fitted for.
Michael — born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou in East Finchley, north London, the son of a Greek Cypriot restaurateur who'd emigrated from Patriki in the 1950s — spent Faith's press cycle in exactly this jacket, cultivating an image sharper and more guarded than the sunnier Wham! years that came before it. The leather was armor as much as costume: stubble, sunglasses, a studied refusal to be soft that the songs themselves kept quietly undercutting. "To wear a jacket that has become so synonymous with that era was pretty surreal, and an honor," Sombr said of putting it on.
There's a version of a tribute performance that amounts to impersonation — the wig, the exact replica, the choreography copied frame by frame. Sombr's version skipped the costume logic entirely and went for the object itself, which is a stranger and more honest gesture: he didn't need to resemble George Michael, because the jacket was already doing the one piece of resembling that mattered. Everything else on stage — the voice, the phrasing, the fact that a Lower East Side kid raised on Radiohead was the one they asked — stayed entirely his own.
By the time the song ended, the jacket had outlasted a second performer's set. It'll go back to wherever it lives when it isn't being worn, creased in the same places, no closer to new.
