British Knights is a shoe company founded in 1980 by the Jack Schwartz Shoes Inc, based in New York. The first footwear range was released in America in 1986 and in the UK in 1989.

British Knights footwear and apparel was popular in the U.S., UK, Europe and Australia during the early 1990s, particularly within the hip hop scene. The brand was similar in design to SPX and Troop footwear and poised a market threat to established rivals such as Nike and Adidas.

The shoes were recognisable by their chunky sole design, large tongue and inclusion of multiple "BK" logos on the heel, toe guard and upper. Indeed, the principal stylists used for BK were also employed by SPX and Troop. Several models including BK's "Director High" are almost identical to Troop models. The brand was featured prominently in hip hop and dance music videos by artists such as Public Enemy, Technotronic and Beats International.

British Knights and the 1980s
JSSI's sales skyrocketed in the late 1980s, from just $8 million in 1986 to $136 million in 1989. The British Knights brand garnered three percent of the United States athletic shoe market by 1988, ranking it seventh among the leading footwear brands. Footwear News's Rich Wilner acknowledged BK as "one of the hottest young athletic footwear companies in the country" in a 1992 company profile. In fact, the shoes became so popular that in 1990 Larry Schwartz told Fortune magazine's Alan Deutschman that "We've held back and controlled growth because we wanted to maintain a mystique for the brand." The company tried to manage its exclusivity, for example, by limiting distribution to specialty athletic shoe stores like Foot Locker and eschewing mass merchandisers.

But just as the fashion appeal of Keds, Doc Martens, Birkenstocks, and Hush Puppies have waxed and waned over the years, the fervor for British Knights began to subside in the early 1990s. It became clear that the Schwartzes had failed to sufficiently reign in the brand. As sales growth started to slow, Larry Schwartz acknowledged that "Our success in the late 1980s was clearly a fad. Our challenge is to turn a fad into a brand." British Knights slid out of the top ten brands by 1992, and its market share fell to less than 2 percent. In 1996, annual sales of BKs were estimated at $125 million.