Use of Inversion : Adverbial phrase

Linguistically speaking, English is primarily an SVO language. (Subject-Verb-Object)

There might be cases the verb comes last, but this isn't one of them.

Your second part was SOV.(Subject-Object-Verb: Appearence-men-is) I wouldn't bet on it being grammatical.

(My native Hindi is SOV, as is your Korean, according to wikipedia. Maybe that caused the confusion.)

The thing is, to a native speaker, the emphasis on the is is apparent here:

"We could say appearance was important to men in the past and it IS to men in the present.

So your attempt for emphasis was misguided.

As for the second case, a native speaker would expect a word after is so the verb doesn't come last:

We could say appearance was important to men in the past and to men in the present it is (essential)

[Wikipedia]

EDIT: John Lawler has spoken. It's ungrammatical like I said. And his word is, you know, The Law.