One busy afternoon in her studio, Auckland fashion designer Deirdre Smythe receives a phone call from the police.

The remains of a mountaineer, killed 30 years earlier in a fall on Mount Tasman, have been discovered on a glacier in New Zealand’s Southern Alps. The body could be that of a ski-mountaineering instructor who was Dee’s one-time lover.

While coping with her grown daughter, who suffers from a mysterious ailment, and her demented mother, who resides in a rest home, Deirdre’s memory is jogged by the phone call to reconstruct the events around the time of the alpine disaster, and recreate her relationship with her ex-husband and climbing mates into an exotic, award-winning wearable artwork while she envisages her future.