Although the “YKK” zipper wasn’t as common, it was used in the bag I found. The black bag was manufactured early, before Dooney started the sewn-in tags with numbers. So why all the inconsistencies to what I found on purse forums? It’s not that they were wrong - it’s just that there are so many variables. Mertz set me straight: They were both real, and they’re both early bags from the late 80s or early 90s. With how new the green one looked, I decided it could be a new knockoff of a vintage design. I decided my black bag must have been a really good fake from the 80s or 90s because it didn’t have the Italian zipper. The green bag had its serial number tag cut out, leaving only a few threads behind.Ī bag’s hardware can be key in this process. Most Dooney’s have zippers from Italian brand “RIRI.” The black bag had no sewn-in tag with a serial number, which the blogs told me was not good. But the black bag had a brass zipper by the “YKK” brand. The stitching was the right shade of yellow, also good. The logos on my bags were sewn in place, not glued on both bags - good. And what made me so sure about the authenticity of black bag I’d picked up the month before in Atlanta? I could tell they were both real leather, but that isn’t always enough. The bag looked too new considering it was supposed to date to the early 1990s. The kelly green was still bright and I couldn’t just leave it there.īy the time I drove home, I was convinced I wasted my money. But the 90s are back right now, and the bag looked brand new. The second, I got at a local Plato’s Closet on Black Friday, which is not the usual spot to find a vintage handbag. I bought my first Dooney & Bourke this October in an Atlanta thrift store. I hated the idea that I could have high-class knock-offs sewn by child laborers in foreign sweatshops. How do you train a workforce to learn, fast, what it took many experts decades to master?Īfter a week reading every forum, article and blog post I could find, I realized I couldn’t determine if my own favorite designer items were real. Trying to authenticate my own bags showed me the problem big-scale secondhand operations are facing. You need to know the font type is right, what the date code is, if the hologram is right.” “It’s difficult to teach this stuff,” Sadowsky told me over the phone. That’s what led me to email Jill Sadowsky, who runs a luxury online-only consignment business out of Jacksonville,.

Dooney and bourke serial lookup