The Knot is the oldest file in the maison's register, originally from 1978 and reissued in essentially every era since. That longevity makes it a layered record rather than a single entry: the design stays, while each era's materials, frame finish and chain work date the individual example. It is the same lesson the register learned on reissued icons elsewhere: the model has one birthday, the bag in your hand has another.
The knot clasp itself became the house's only recurring emblem, the nearest thing to a logo a logo-less maison allows itself, which is why the motif keeps resurfacing, on the Jodie's handle and on the Blazy-era strap mounts, each appearance a dated citation of this 1978 original.
Date the example, not the design. A Knot is 1978 as a model and anything from 1978 to this morning as an object; the era evidence lives in the materials and the metal.
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.