The first two decades of the 1900's saw dramatic changes in how artists portrayed American women in magazines and other media. Instead of the prim, proper, and idealized "Gibson girl" socialite of the 1890's, the public was treated to an outpouring of more modern, active, and athletic images of women. Chief among the early architects of this "Golden Age of American Illustration" was Coles Phillips, popularizer of the "fade-away" style, and one of the first artists whose images of ladies were frequently torn out of magazines and swiped out of store windows to become pin-ups on college dormitory walls.

Phillips was born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1880, and attended Kenyon College (where some of his earliest illustrations appeared in the school's yearbook) while working as a clerk for the American Radiator Company. He moved to New York before graduating, however, and briefly took night classes at the Chase School of Art while working in the New York office of the radiator company. With little interest in clerical work, he soon moved to a studio that produced advertising illustrations on an "assembly-line" basis, with one worker doing the heads and passing the picture down to the next, who supplied the suit; Phillips did the feet, and his talent in drawing a shapely ankle was frequently put to use, in the years to come, in the many elegant hosiery ads he produced.