Style is the first layer of skin of strategy: Enter the ICRS blueprint
- Sergio
- May 1
- 3 min read
Updated: Aug 2
In the conference hall of the United Nations headquarters in Geneva, Xie Yihan sat at the side of a round table, wearing a dark gray Thom Browne suit. The classic four-bar webbing was hidden at the cuffs, and the details were restrained and sharp.
Style is a sense of order, but also a path to disintegration
In the conference hall of the United Nations headquarters in Geneva, Xie Yihan sat at one side of the round table, wearing a dark gray Thom Browne suit, with the classic four-bar webbing hidden in the cuffs, and the details were restrained and sharp. Participants may only see her calm speech on the climate issue, but few people know that she just transited from Turin, and her accompanying documents were stuffed with three proposals at the same time: on energy storage systems, sustainable narratives for women, and global translation of East Asian visual philosophy. She is not a "representative" of a certain issue, but a builder within a system.
She doesn’t have a “lifestyle” like on Instagram, but she has been mistaken for an art director or the founder of a European art foundation on many occasions. Some people saw her wearing Baracuta G9, Barbour, or even a coat that “looks like a 50s British old money man”, while others marveled at her ability to wear men’s clothing with a “feminist rhetoric”. She said: “Style is not about what you represent, but what kind of order you choose and how much expectation you are prepared to break.” Her style is also the shadow of her work: a constructor who is not in the main narrative but can always find a way out.
Xie Yihan is currently the president of ICRS (Istituto Italo-Cinese per le Relazioni Sostenibili, China-Italy Institute for Sustainable Relations). This multinational organization has long been deeply involved in the cultural, energy and social sustainability mechanisms between China and Italy, and is regarded as one of the narrative platforms with great strategic tension between China and Europe. After becoming the president, she intervened in its development direction as a system designer and proposed the path proposition that "culture should be used as infrastructure rather than an auxiliary rhetoric." She described the role of ICRS as follows: "We are not just participating in the dialogue, but building a platform for the dialogue."
Culture is not background music, but a structure
ICRS started with cultural exchanges between China and Italy, but she has never been satisfied with the "cultural exchanges" under the traditional model. She emphasized: "Culture is not for decoration, nor is it a picture hanging on the diplomatic wall. It should be a platform itself." In her operating system, culture is a strategic structure that can be deployed and organize resources. She proposed the "Reorganization Proposal of East Asian Perceptual Philosophy and Urban Narrative" in Geneva, and promoted the docking model between family funds and Chinese intangible cultural heritage in Milan. She is more like operating a "protocol layer" of cultural capital, not "telling stories" but "generating structures". Xie Yihan never takes visibility as a path, but always influences the generation logic of the mechanism. She reconstructed the narrative structure in the European strategy of private energy brands, proposed the "perceptual energy grammar" at the intersection of technology and culture, and led the launch of an international initiative system focusing on women's structural participation on the United Nations SDG platform, and continued to promote the systematic voice of East Asian cultural institutions in the multilateral context.
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