Designer serial number and date code checkers, brand by brand

No. A code is a manufacturing marking, and counterfeiters copy markings. Read correctly, it places a piece in its production run and rules out the crudest fakes. That makes it a floor rather than a verdict: leather, stitching and hardware still need a trained eye.

Because not every brand encodes one. Hermès, Dior and Louis Vuitton put production dates into their markings, so a year can be read from the code. A Prada serial gives the style, the material and the lot, and never held a date at all: for Prada, the date was printed on the authenticity card. The tiles above say which is which, brand by brand, rather than inventing a year for the ones that have none.

Usually not. Louis Vuitton moved to an embedded microchip in March 2021 and Chanel at about the same time, and Hermès moved its stamp position in 2015. Far more often you are looking in the wrong place, or at a recent item.

Because for most brands there is nothing to check. A tool that returns a year for a code holding no year is a guess dressed up as an answer, and several published checkers do exactly that. A brand appears above only when verified reference data supports it, so this list is deliberately shorter than the list of brands our team authenticates.

They come from professional authentication references, cross-checked against dated examples and reviewed in-house. Where the sources disagree, the page says so.

It depends on the brand and often on the era. Each brand's own page says where to look, which is usually the answer when someone believes their item carries no marking.

Only indirectly. It places production in an era, and versions of a model do differ in value. It says nothing about condition, completeness or demand.

Check which part of the marking they read. Several published checkers count letters straight through the alphabet, which stopped being correct for Hermès after 2014.

Nothing, in practice. They are the same idea under different names: a marking the maker puts on an item to record what it is and when it was made. Louis Vuitton and Dior call it a date code, Gucci and Prada call it a serial number, Hermès presses a single letter into the leather and calls it a blind stamp. The page you need is the one for your brand, not the one that matches the words you searched.

No, and that is why there are thirty-six separate checkers here rather than one universal decoder. Every house invented its own scheme, several changed it more than once, and a few encode no date at all. A single box that claimed to read any brand's code would have to be guessing for most of them. The table above says which brands give a year and which do not, before you type anything.