Fashion: Support for the Needy

Couturiers often seem to regard the bosom as an unsightly bit of female topography that must be bound and bandaged lest it get in the way of style; sometimes, like insanity in the family, the bosom even has been treated as a dark secret. But Christian Dior's Marc Bohan sent a little black dress down the runway at last summer's Paris collections that not only acknowledged the bosom but exposed it almost entirely. American buyers looked at the peep show cautiously, concluded it was a gag, not a trend. They were wrong. Women saw in the new decolletage the...