Dior date code checker, find the month and year

Take the four-digit group at the end. First and third digits give the month, second and fourth the year. So 0161 is June 2011. The two digits in front of the letters are not part of the date. It is counter-intuitive, which is why so many guides misread it.

They identify the factory. MA, BO and RU are Dior's three Italian plants and account for most bags, BN is a fourth and much rarer Italian one. ID is France and MC is Spain, and both are uncommon. Other two-letter groups do turn up, BM, CA and TR among them, and no reference we trust assigns them a country, so the checker returns the date and leaves the factory blank rather than guessing. On older pieces the letters come first, with no leading pair of digits, and the date is read the same way.

Usually on the reverse of the interior leather tag. Some pieces carry it on a separate tag, and occasionally it is heat-stamped straight into the leather.

Not from the numbers alone. An authentic Dior serial number decodes to a sensible month and year, and so do plenty of codes on fakes, because a plausible code is easy to print. What separates them is the shape of the digits, the spacing and the depth of the stamp rather than the reading. A clean decode tells you the numbers are internally consistent, nothing more.

Usually a misread digit rather than a fake. 0 and 8, and 1 and 7, are easy to confuse in Dior's stamping. Photograph the tag in raking light and check again.

Yes, as far as anything documented goes. Dior footwear and small leather goods use the same format as the bags and the same reading rule, and nothing in our sources gives the B30 a system of its own, so if your pair carries a four digit group this page reads it. Two honest caveats. Our sources photograph the code on bags, not on shoes, so we cannot tell you a documented spot to look on a sneaker beyond where the size and the made in text are printed. And small items are the least consistent in the range, so a missing or odd code on a shoe is much weaker evidence than the same thing on a bag. Our own B30 counterfeit guide covers the rest of the sneaker, which is where the answer actually lies.

Then this page will not give you a year, on purpose. Every published reference puts the start of the system at about 1997 and every one of them hedges it; the earliest codes anyone publishes decode to February 1998 and May 1999, and the dated vintage listings we could check all decode to 2000 or later. Against that, the authenticator course reads a crocodile piece as September 1992 under the same rule, without a word about when the system began. Two sides, and we keep the floor at 1997 rather than print a year we cannot stand behind. An absent or undecodable code on a genuinely vintage Dior is not a fault either: several references note that early bags, the first Lady Diors included, are authentic with no code at all.

On Italian-made pieces the strokes are deliberately uneven in weight: the 1 leans its head in close to the body, the 3 is small on top and larger below, the 5 has a flat C-shaped belly, the 6 and 9 sit at a slight slant, and the 8 is smaller on top than underneath. Size, height and spacing vary between characters, which is normal: each factory runs several sets of dies, and a French-made code uses a different face again. It matters more here than on other brands because most current Dior bags carry very little hardware, so the logo and the code are two of the few hard, checkable elements on the piece. Before 2019 the three Italian factories changed their die sets on a regular pattern, which is why a code can read correctly and still be wrong for its stated year.

Not on its own, and our sources disagree about it. The professional handbook photographs a MADE IN FRANCE Lady Dior tag stamped ID-0149 and ID-0211, the course shows the same two tags and reads them as April 2019 and January 2021, and one independent reference lists ID as the French factory code alongside MA, BO and RU for Italy and MC for Spain. Other widely read guides say the opposite, that Dior stopped making bags in France before the codes existed, so no French-made bag carries one. Treat a Made in France stamp on a coded bag as a reason to look harder rather than as a verdict in either direction. This is the one entry on this page our own sources contradict each other on, and we would rather say so than pick a side.