Back then, Balenciaga was on a roll, with viral items selling out everywhere, and projects like the summer 2022 show – which featured a mini episode of The Simpsons – racking up millions of views on YouTube.

The setting of my second meeting with Demna (whose surname is Gvasalia – he only goes by his given name) couldn’t have been more different from the mayhem of that New York Sunday morning. On the eve of the brand’s autumn/winter 2023 haute couture show in July, the 42-year-old greeted me calmly at Balenciaga’s Paris headquarters – chilled, welcoming, and simply attired in a black coat.

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Demna, who lives outside Geneva in Switzerland and travels to Paris once a month, can seem an intimidating prospect to those familiar with his runway shenanigans and the dystopian vibe of his shows. Born in Georgia, the former Soviet republic, he later moved with his family to Germany. After earning a master’s degree in fashion design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, he cut his teeth at Maison Margiela and Louis Vuitton before teaming up with his brother Guram to launch buzzy label Vetements, which became the talk of the town in Paris and beyond when it launched in 2014.

Melding streetwear with conceptualism and a touch of couture, Vetements injected a much-needed dose of energy into the fashion of the times, leading to Demna’s elevation to creative director of Balenciaga in 2015.

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Trainers, hoodies and collaborations with brands such as Adidas and Crocs, all engineered by Demna, turned Balenciaga into the hottest house around, influencing competitors and upstarts alike, and inadvertently advancing the notion of fashion as entertainment that the industry has embraced in recent years.

While Demna may have been the instigator of all this, he makes it very clear that he never set out to turn fashion into a circus of celebrities and viral products. In 2021, he unveiled his first haute couture collection for Balenciaga, decades after the brand had stopped playing a role in the most elevated form of dressmaking in Western fashion.

“I hate fashion as entertainment. It’s so easy to lose yourself in that, which is why I [am now doing] couture,” he says. “Entertainment is great but if fashion is only entertainment then it’s nothing; if it’s only there to create reactions. You can’t avoid virality – with the internet and social media and phones – and it’s OK, you have to deal with that, but to me that’s not the essence of fashion. I’m not interested in that at all.

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“Even though I have done things instinctively and naturally that have had an impact in pop culture, and people know Balenciaga because of that, that’s only one per cent of what Balenciaga is to me. It never works when you plan these kinds of things, it only works when you’re having fun and things speak to other people and then they have an impact. Sometimes it’s about humour. Fashion can be very serious and full of itself.”

“It was out of control but there’s not much you can do about that,” he says. “This is the price to pay for the accessibility of information: you don’t know what’s true or not true any more. This is the world we live in and you have to accept it and survive and adapt the way you’re dealing with it, especially when you’re very exposed as a brand.

“I’m not sure it’s reached its climax yet – the craziness is yet to come,” he says, addressing December’s scandal. “We experienced something that was just the tip of the iceberg – you just have to live with those things and find rules and be vigilant and be aware. At the end of the day you have to have fun with what you do – if you don’t have fun, nothing makes sense any more. We humans are made to have fun and made to have a sense of humour and enjoy. I love going to a fitting because you know it’s going to be fun and not a serious 10-hour day.”

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Speaking of fittings, Demna says that for him there is nothing as rewarding as devoting enough time to making beautiful garments such as the impeccable creations at the heart of couture.

“This is the reason I do this in general: to make clothes that will change people’s experience of wearing them and that’s what you can do with couture in the best way,” he says, adding that a couture look requires more than double the number of fittings than ready-to-wear. “Of course it’s an exclusive club kind of situation because to make a couture garment takes so much effort and time. This is the sheer luxury of today’s life as a fashion designer. Who has one year to make just one piece? This is essential to Balenciaga because it speaks to the most important thing for me – and coincidentally this was the most important thing for Cristóbal.”

The late Spaniard would not recognise today’s Balenciaga, but Demna points out that there are quite a lot of parallels between his approach and that of the founder. “He was always ahead of the fashion and couture of the times. He was an avant-gardist creator in everything he did, so for me being modern and being a 21st century brand is exactly his legacy,” he explains. “I could make a cocoon coat that looks like a retro coat from Cristóbal, but I have to speak to people from now and not people who used to buy Balenciaga in the 60s.”

His recent emphasis on couture is a way to elevate a brand that to many luxury consumers is mainly associated with T-shirts and trainers, but Demna doesn’t want to repudiate that more everyday aspect of the company. After all, he wouldn’t have the privilege of making couture if it weren’t for the success of Balenciaga’s more accessible lines.

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“I’ve never tried to move away from anything streetwear because we can’t really move away. It would be very hypocritical if I told you that. No brand can move away from streetwear if you want to be successful – people say it just to create that expensive narrative, but it’s crap,” he says matter of factly. “Everybody does sneakers and streetwear. When I did the logo T-shirts there was a scandal and now everybody does it.”

“The beauty of Balenciaga is that it’s supposed to speak to many different people, so saying that streetwear doesn’t exist is not true, it’s a narrative made by fashion media that is a complete lie and fake news.”

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“It’s awful what’s going on and it’s very saddening that we live in this kind of world. It’s worse than it’s ever been and at the same time you continue doing what you do – you have to do your job,” he says. “I’m very pragmatic and very aware of what’s going on. I start my day reading the news, it’s a bit of an obsession. I meditate first to relax – that’s the crazy thing – and then I go to the kitchen and have a cup of coffee and read the news and it’s the opposite of that, but that’s the world now.”