Longest fashion shoes

The longest widely-adopted shoe style was the poulaine (also known as the "piked shoe" or "crakow"). These shoes, which were worn by both men and women for more than a century between around 1340 and the 1460s, featured a long slender point which extended from the toe of the shoe. The longest surviving examples measure around 45 cm (18 inches) in length, but contemporary accounts suggest that at the peak of the craze fashionable Europeans may have worn shoes even longer than that (up to 24 inches).

Writers mention fashionable young men having to reinforce the points of their shoes with whalebone or support them with lengths of silk cord tied to a garter. The shoes were considered such a vain extravagance that they were banned in Paris in 1396, but they persisted as fashionable items elsewhere until 1463, when Edward IV of England passed a sumptuary law prohibiting shoes with points that extended more than two inches beyond the toe. This seems to have finally ended the fashion, and they disappeared entirely from the feet of the wealthy by the 1470s.