The Cabat is the house arguing its whole case in one object: a 2001 tote woven double-faced so the inside is as finished as the outside, with no lining to hide behind, barely any hardware, and nothing written anywhere. Tomas Maier built it as the manifesto of the relaunch, and a quarter-century later it is still the purest expression of the no-logo position this register documents in the maison file.
Unlined double-face weave is also the model's own authentication: the construction leaves nowhere for shortcuts to hide. The common fakes are woven single-face and finished with a glued or stitched lining, which is exactly the thing the real bag exists to not have.
Turn it inside out, politely. A Cabat with a lining is answering a question nobody should have to ask twice.
Bottega Veneta is the register's control experiment: the house whose 1960s slogan was that your own initials are enough, and whose bags accordingly carry no exterior logo, no date code and no cipher for any tool on this site to decode. The interior tag's numbers are style and production references, not a calendar, so do not buy a date read from them. Date by era instead: the intrecciato weave itself is the signature, and its scale is a typeface with birthdays, classic gauge across the first five decades, the enlarged maxi weave and its padded form belonging to the new-Bottega years from 2019. Model birthdays do the rest, because half this file only exists from 2019 onward. On hardware the house is nearly silent, which makes the little it does say count double: zipper sliders on genuine bags come from the closed supplier list this site documents, and a bag with nothing written on it still cannot fake its zip. For any serious purchase, route through a platform authentication program: eBay physically inspects qualifying handbags in transit.
Model histories and date-code systems compiled from documented maison history, resale-industry authentication references, and period documentation, cross-checked across independent sources.