Valentine's Day is just around the corner - and many of us are cringing. If the present provides so little inspiration when it comes to expressing adoration for your paramour, why not look to the past?

While it's unlikely that modern hosts would appreciate a gun-wielding guest at their upcoming New Year's festivities, there are still plenty of sublime, old-fashioned, glamorous amusements that we can import from bygone eras to help us ring in 2011.

Typewriters and flyswatters for Grandpa or Dad, Victorian flip rings and tea sets for Granny and Mom, wax fangs and lips for Junior and Junior Miss -- there is something here to amuse everyone.

*Scroll down for photos* Last night, guests from New York City, Los Angeles, and London braved a torrential downpour to attend a "Forgotten Fashion" ...

While the dress only stayed on for a few hours due to the workout it gave me, it was a great forray into surrealism, and perhaps a potential future "jewelry-apparel" endeavor was born.

*Scroll down for photos* Last night at a private townhouse in Greenwich Village, cultural events organization The Society hosted a party celebratin...

In 2007, I launched on this site ...

Vreeland's very appearance reflected her mantra that beauty could sometimes be strange and even alarming.

MacGrawn originally began her career in fashion, working at one point as an assistant to legendary editor Diana Vreeland. Perhaps this influenced her wonderfully innovative approach to dressing.

Ms. Head's snippets of advice and witticisms were as closely heeded as those attributed to Coco Chanel, and they remain relevant today: "You can have anything you want in life if you dress for it."

We caught up with "Mad Men"'s costume designer Janie Bryant at a launch party for her book The Fashion File: Advice, Tips, and Inspiration from the Co...

Unlike our other style icons, Casati had her true heyday before World War I -- yet her occult-ish look continues to inspire history-minded fashion insiders generations later.

Today we pay our respects to the great Nancy Cunard, a heiress, activist, and provocateur who shunned a spoiled existence to wage war on the racist attitudes of her generation.

Contemporary audiences will immediately notice how comparatively mature Parker appears compared to today's supermodels. Aesthetics were very different in Parker's day: women strived to look sophisticated, rather than half their age.

Marlene Dietrich is one of my personal heroines. The epitome of Old Hollywood glamour, Dietrich also exuded sex appeal - and yet never veered into crassness. Mystery and subtext were Dietrich's forms of currency; today's bare-all stars could take a lesson or two from her.

This lavishly creative designer was once as revered and famous as Coco Chanel, who referred to her rival as "that Italian artist who makes clothes." Schiaparelli collaborated on pieces and collections with artists Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, and Alberto Giacometti.

Over the next two weeks, you will become reacquainted with some of the twentieth century's seminal tastemakers, designers, and muses -- many of whom are now unjustly fading from public memory.

*Scroll down for the full slideshow* In 2007, we launched on this site ...

The Mad Men world makes a fetish of ornamentation and deifies mysterious artifice; our culture prizes an apathetic informality and rewards the tackiest forms of extroversion.

Today New York City's Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute will open its new exhibit, "American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity." Gazing at the glamorous finery of eras past, as usual I found myself wishing back certain flourishes and trappings, from hand-held fans to white gloves to turbans.