Smith purchased a blue and white pinstripe vintage-style dress with a touch of flora, fauna and flamingos from online store Ali Express after checking her measurements multiple times, but when the dress arrived it was several times too small.
Smith put the dress on Trade Me - where it made the Top 10 most viewed list for 2019 - due to the viral attention it got, after the picture appeared in multiple fashion fails lists.
"I thought I would put it on Trade Me, a few people will laugh, one of my friends bid $2, and I thought she could keep it.
"And then it got shared, the Trade Me auction."
What the dress was meant to look like. Photo / File
The dress ended up selling for $190, with 67,371 views, but the buyer paid for it, and then said he did not want it, telling Smith she had given him a laugh and she could keep the dress.
"It was sort of like a ritual, you know, I'm passing it on to the world, I don't want it, I want it gone from my life, it's still bloody here."
She is hoping in 2020 her picture will stop appearing in articles about fashion fails.
"It would be alright if it was a nice photo, but it's not the most flattering picture of me."
While she is not 100 per cent certain what is next for the dress, she has thought about auctioning it for charity, saying it would be a nice end to the story.
The experience has not put her off online shopping, but she did say if something arrives and is the wrong size she doesn't take photos of it anymore.
The story had a happy ending after Napier vintage clothing shop Two Lippy Ladies gifted Smith a dress.
She is now also part of the Two Lippy Ladies family, as an employee.
And how it fitted when Smith put it on. Photo / Supplied
"That was quite a big change, going from doing in-home nursing stuff to ironically, dressing other people and making them look not as stupid as I looked."
The dress was the fifth most viewed item on Trade Me in 2019.
The top viewed item on Trade Me in 2019 was a Bunnings Hat, which may or may not have belonged to the "unruly tourist" family who visited New Zealand last summer, receiving over 192,000 views.
Two phallic-shaped vegetables made the list, a kumara at number three and a potato at number seven.
An old McDonald's bag, a Pak'nSave plastic bag and the old Big Fresh characters also made the top 10 list.
