First the maison, and it is rarely the logo
The logo is the thing a counterfeiter spends most effort on, which makes it the least useful place to start. A maison is better identified by what it does not advertise: the weight and finish of the hardware, the lining material, the way an edge is painted or turned, the stitch density, and the smell of the leather.
Each house has a grammar. Hermès turns and saddle-stitches by hand and lines in goatskin. Chanel quilts to a set diamond and matches the pattern across every seam it can. Louis Vuitton runs its coated canvas so the monogram is symmetrical down the two sides of a bag. Learn one house's grammar properly and the others read much faster.
The silhouette is the model name
Model names are shapes. A Speedy is a bowling bag with rolled handles and a zip running the length of the top. An Alma is a structured dome with a flat base and feet. A Neverfull is an open tote that flares. Nothing printed on the bag will tell you which one it is — and the model name is what every listing, price guide and resale platform searches on.
So work from the outline before any detail. Handle type, closure type, base shape, and whether the bag stands unaided: four answers put almost any bag into a family, and the family is usually enough to find the name.
- Handles: rolled, flat, chain, top handle plus strap, or none.
- Closure: zip, turnlock, flap with tab, drawstring, open.
- Base: flat with feet, rounded, or boxed with a gusset.
- Structure: holds its shape empty, or collapses when set down.
The number in the name is a measurement
Speedy 25, Speedy 30, Speedy 35. Birkin 30, Kelly 28. The number is the base width in centimetres, and it is the second half of the identification: the same model in two sizes can differ substantially in both price and demand.
Where letters are used instead they are a size class — PM, MM and GM for petit, moyen and grand modèle — and they are relative to the model rather than absolute. A Neverfull MM and an Alma MM are not the same size as each other. Measure the base in centimetres and neither system can catch you out.
The interior stamp, and what it does not say
Nearly every house strikes its name into the interior leather or onto a small tab: the maison, usually a country of manufacture, occasionally nothing more. Struck properly it is impressed into the leather at an even depth with consistent letter spacing, and foiling, where there is foiling, wears away rather than flaking off.
The country line is real information and is routinely misread. Louis Vuitton manufactures in France, Spain, Italy, Germany and the United States, so “made in Spain” on one is ordinary rather than suspicious. What matters is whether the stamp is struck the way that house strikes it — not which country it names.
Hardware, lining and the era
Hardware dates a bag. Houses change the finish of their brass, the shape of a zip pull, the maker of the zip itself and the engraving on a lock over the decades, and those changes are documented well enough that a lock or a zip will usually place a bag within a period.
Lining does the same work. Louis Vuitton has run brown canvas, a red-brown microfibre and textile linings across different lines and eras; Chanel's lining material and interior pocket shapes have changed repeatedly. A bag whose lining does not belong to the era its hardware suggests is a bag worth a much longer look.
The date code, and the honest caveat about it
Many houses impress a code inside — a date code, a blind stamp, a serial — encoding a period and often a workshop. It is genuine evidence of era, and it is also the single most over-trusted check in the entire field. Counterfeiters have been printing plausible codes for thirty years.
It expires, too. Louis Vuitton stopped using date codes in March 2021 in favour of a microchip embedded in the lining, readable by the maison rather than by you — so a bag whose hardware and lining place it after 2021 and which carries a neat stamped date code is wrong on its face. Read a code as one line of evidence about age, never as proof of anything.
What a photograph can carry, and what it cannot
Silhouette, hardware shape, canvas or leather type, handle style and proportion are all visible in a single frame, and that is precisely the evidence a model-level identification rests on. The Lovenhall Bag Identifier reads a photograph, names the likely bag and gives an indicative value band — the fastest route from “some designer bag” to a name you can actually search.
What a photograph cannot carry is stitch count, hardware weight, the smell of the leather, or the depth a stamp is struck to. Those are the authentication evidence. A picture will tell you it is a Speedy 30. It will not tell you whose Speedy 30 it is.
- Photograph the whole bag square-on against a plain background.
- Then the interior stamp, the hardware and the base, close and in focus.
- Daylight, no flash — flash flattens grain and hides the run of a canvas.
- Measure the base width in centimetres and write it down.
Identifying it is not authenticating it
Once you have the name the question usually changes. Which bag is this becomes is this bag real, and that is a different investigation with a different order of evidence: construction before markings, stitching before logos, and the maison's own silence at the end of it, because no house authenticates a bag for a member of the public.
The register keeps that room separately — weighted checks per maison, in the order that actually settles things, with an honest note on the limits of each. It is worth working through before you pay anybody for an opinion.