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. ID is France and MC is Spain, and both are uncommon. Other two-letter groups do turn up, mostly on vintage pieces, and we have no sourced country for them, 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.

No. It gives a production date, not a verdict. Dior fakes frequently carry codes that decode perfectly well; the giveaway is the shape of the digits, the spacing and the depth of the stamp rather than the numbers themselves.

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.

The same format, but they are the least consistent items in the range. Small leather goods are where irregular sequences turn up most often, and the code can be heat-stamped into the lining rather than printed on a tag. Treat a missing or odd code on a small item as much weaker evidence than on a bag.

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, because each factory runs several sets of dies. A French-made code uses a different face again and is not directly comparable.

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.