Balenciaga Twiggy entered the record around 2004: barrel-shaped east-west satchel, shorter and deeper than the city, with detachable shoulder strap, in distressed lambskin and goatskin, with classic studs and buckles hardware and the zip top.
The barrel of the line, on shelves by the 2004 collections and often dated a season earlier - holds as much as a City in a shape half a size smaller.
The introduction is marked circa because the documentation is: fashion houses publish far less history than they manufacture, and the file records the range the evidence supports rather than inventing precision.
The full collector's file for this model, era details, and the authentication walk-through are on the writing schedule; the record above is permanent.
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.