At Nicopolis, the fashion of an age met the one thing fashion forgets: a man has to be able to run.

In September 1396, the finest knights in France fled a battlefield in Bulgaria.

According to those who told the story afterwards, some of them stopped to cut the toes off their shoes first.

The Battle of Nicopolis was meant to be a triumph. A crusading army of French, Burgundian and Hungarian knights had marched east to stop the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid, and the French insisted on the honour of striking first. They charged against advice, broke the front line, and found themselves exhausted and surrounded. By the end of the day, much of the flower of French chivalry was dead or captured. One Hospitaller commander is said to have blamed the defeat on French pride and vanity.

And on their feet, if the accounts are true, was the proudest vanity of all.

They were called poulaines, or crakows, after Kraków, where the style was thought to have begun. The toe was drawn out into a long point and stuffed to hold its shape. In 1394, a monk of Evesham complained of points half a yard long that had to be tied to the leg with silver chains before a man could walk. A chronicler thought them better suited to the claws of demons than to the feet of men. An English poem of the 1380s grumbled that a man in them could hardly kneel to pray.

Kings tried to legislate them away. Paris banned them in 1368. In 1463, Edward IV capped the point at two inches for anyone below the rank of lord. The fashion outlasted most of its critics.

How many knights actually reached for a knife at Nicopolis, nobody can say. Perhaps fewer than the story suggests. But the story has lasted six centuries because it is so exactly right: a shoe designed to be admired, defeated by the simplest demand ever made of a shoe.

It is a useful thing to remember about style. The best-dressed men in history were rarely those who wore the most. They were those who understood what each detail was for.

A sock is the opposite of a poulaine. It asks for nothing, announces nothing, and does its work out of sight. Atelier Cavalier’s are hand-knitted by a family-run maison in Italy, now a hundred years old, from 100% cotton lisle (fil d’Écosse). The finest ones are finished by hand, and meant to be forgotten the moment they are on.

The knights of Nicopolis dressed to be looked at.

In the end, they had to dress to be able to leave.