BCD is just a method of using 4-bit values to represent a digit of a decimal number. The 4-digit codes, 1010,1011,1100,1101, and 1111 are invalid because they would translate to 10-15, which are not decimal numbers.
You can see that BCD is more inefficient that binary, but easier to directly read.
1111 is invalid as a BCD number directly, but as binary it is equal to decimal 15, which will require two BCD digits 0001 and 0101.