In 2000, Balenciaga's owners asked their young creative director for a licensed accessory, a little business. Nicolas Ghesquiere answered with a bag that broke every rule of the moment: unstructured, logo-free, in thin distressed leather, with exposed studs and dangling lariats, shown with the Fall 2001 collection as the Le Dix Motorcycle Lariat. Management refused to produce it; the it bags of the day, the Baguette, the Saddle, the Speedy, were structured and branded, and this was neither. Then Kate Moss asked for one after the show, a first run of 25 was made for the runway circle, and the refusal collapsed. The First, the production version, founded the entire motorcycle line and the anti-logo luxury it named.
Its early production carries its own archaeology: bags through late 2002 wear flat brass hardware sitting flush against the leather, raised hardware follows, and, critically for dating, nothing made before Fall/Winter 2003 carries a season letter at all. An early First is dated by its hardware, rivets, and tag fonts, not by a code, and the letter decoder on this site says exactly that when asked.
The founding bag trades on early-production tells that counterfeiters rarely bother to learn: flat brass, smooth-backed rivets, the no-letter tag. Thin distressed leather also ages hard, so condition and originality pull in opposite directions here; an honest worn First beats a suspiciously fresh one.
Balenciaga dating runs on the season letter: from Fall/Winter 2003 the tag carries a letter that maps to a half-year, running backwards through the alphabet, and because the alphabet has cycled, most letters now mean two possible seasons, split by tag features - metal plate or leather-only, the letter repeated on the tag back from Fall 2012, the color-code line from 2010, the large MADE IN ITALY from 2011. Production before Fall 2003 carries no letter at all, so a letterless tag on an early bag is correct, not suspicious. The style number must match front and back of the tag, the leather is thin and matte where fakes run thick and shiny, and the hardware families have birthdays of their own. The season letter decoder on this site handles the whole system, cycle ambiguity included.
Model histories and date-code systems compiled from documented maison history, resale-industry authentication references, and period documentation, cross-checked across independent sources.