Abstract Clothing segmentation is a challenging vision problem typically implemented within a fine-grained semantic segmentation framework. Different from conventional segmentation, clothing segmentation has some domain-specific properties such as texture richness, diverse appearance variations, nonrigid geometry deformations, and small sample learning. To deal with these points, we propose a semantic locality-aware segmentation model, which adaptively attaches an original clothing image with a semantically similar (e.g., appearance or pose) auxiliary exemplar by search. Through considering the interactions of the clothing image and its exemplar, more intrinsic knowledge about the locality manifold structures of clothing images is discovered to make the learning process of small sample problem more stable and tractable. Furthermore, we present a CNN model based on the deformable convolutions to extract the non-rigid geometryaware features for clothing images. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model against the state-of-the-art approaches.