Data samples of complicated geometry and nonlinear separability are considered as common challenges to clustering algorithms. In this article, we first construct Mahalanobis distance in the kernel space and then propose a novel fuzzy clustering model with a kernelized Mahalanobis distance, namely KMD-FC. The key contributions of KMD-FC include: first, the construction of KMD matrix is innovatively transformed from the Euclidean distance kernel matrix, which is able to effectively avoid the problem of 'curse of dimensionality' posed by explicitl...