Make sure you have the "body" of the clothes figure selected before you conform to figure 1 or whatever the number is of the figure you want to put clothes on. that usually works for me. And as Trav said, when you pose the figure make sure you have selected same figure 1 and the body of it to apply the pose.

The greatest part of wisdom is learning to develop  the ineffable genius of extracting the "neither here nor there" out of any situation...."