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“I belong to the last generation that can reasonably call itself ‘Soviet’—I was fifteen when the empire fell apart—and can vouch for the fact that we grew up with some pretty terrible stuff,” writes editor Michael Idov by way of introduction to Made in Russia: Unsung Icons of Soviet Design. It’s true that Iron Curtain motifs tend to conjure humorless functionality (c.f. ‘Iron Curtain’) or high kitsch, but this big-hearted compendium proves that even as the USSR began to disintegrate, it managed, through objects and toys and technologies, to articulate a national sensibility as confounding, elusive, and magical as the Pyramid Milk Carton.

Few gentleman of the modern age can pull of lavender-hued Savile Row suiting; fewer still can do it without seeming wholly in the grip of persnickety nostalgia. But Hamish Bowles, Vogue’s European editor at large, makes a bespoke three-piece look downright modern. An éminence grise of fashion history and a formidable collector of European couture, this month, Bowles will release Balenciaga and Spain (Skira Rizzoli), a sumptuous tome on the couturier’s life and work set to accompany a traveling museum exhibition of the same name that Bowles curated (it opened at the de Young Museum in San Francisco on March 26).

Last January, when I interviewed Will Cotton, painter of all things syrupy and delicious - including the pert nudes who've populated his canvases lately - he was just beginning to pack up his studio to move from Chinatown to Harrison Street in Tribeca. Though he's just recently completed the transfer, Cotton took the time to share with us his favorite spots around Chinatown, the neighborhood where he lived and worked for over a decade. Discover the best shops to buy candy for your next Fragonard-inspired portrait and where to find fabulous cured hearing (yes, Scandinavian paradise White Slab Palace is involved) after the jump.

What's Fine Art's Place in Pop Culture?

I’ve never been lucky in hair. Not that I haven’t been graced with a full of head of it, or that it couldn’t sometimes be said to look shiny in certain lights – but in cut, style, and stylist. Three of the worst do’s I’ve sported: A military man’s high n’ tight, bangs, the bowl cut my father gave me literally using a bowl (I looked like a monk from the Dark Ages, as my front two teeth had recently fallen out - I was 6). So it was with feelings of angst and learned resignation that I agreed to visit Valery Joseph’s salon for a ‘transformation.’

With Annabelle, Annabelle, photographer Caitlin Teal Price’s newly-opened solo show at Wild Project in Alphabet City, women are either luminously present or nowhere at all. Price’s subjects, mostly middle-age women – “Tamar, Las Vegas,” “Nancy, New Orleans” – outfitted in retro-seeming office attire, are set against concrete hinterlands: overpasses, garages, industrial parks.

The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that Dior will move to formally fire John Galliano from his long-held post as the luxury brand's Creative Director specifically in light of the anti-Semitic slurs he recently made at a Paris cafe, which Natalie Portman, the face of Dior’s Miss Dior Cherie fragrance, openly condemned yesterday. In France, it is illegal to make anti-Semitic remarks.

Not a week after Dior Creative Director John Galliano was arrested at Paris' La Perle brasserie for allegedly making racist and anti-Semitic remarks, The Sun has posted a video in which the designer, visibly drunk and wearing a militaristic hat that surely doesn't help his case, says to the table next to him, "I love Hitler. People like you would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed." French news outlets have confirmed that it is Galliano in the film.

I’m not a huge basketball fan (soccer’s my game), but here’s what I’ve been able to glean about the too-early-to-tell-but-possibly-disastrous Knicks trading snafu: Carmelo Anthony is now a member of New York’s beleaguered (but recently pretty good!) team; he was traded for a bunch of talented young players, including Danillo ‘the Rooster’ Gallinari; Anthony’s name is the type that’s writ large; this brings the Knicks tally of superstars - Anthony and Amar’e Stoudemire - up to two. Also, they have a sterling team of marketers, as evidenced by this Odyssean video giving Anthony a hero’s welcome, set to music by Diddy Dirty Money.

Breaking news from the Department of A Decade Too Late: The Obama administration will no longer support the Defense of Marriage Act, the 1996 policy ratified by Bill Clinton that limits the definition of marriage to that between a man and a woman. “The President and I have concluded that classifications based on sexual orientation warrant heightened scrutiny,” wrote Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in a letter to Congress yesterday announcing that the Justice Department will cease defending DOMA in court.