On Thursday evening, the Winter Antiques Show at the Seventh Regiment Armory will open to a crowd of collectors and socialites who have paid hundreds of dollars a ticket to get a first look at the objects for sale. The Winter Show, which, along with the International Show, is one of the premier antique shows in New York, exhibits the finest examples of everything from English furniture to American quilts; from antique jewelry to Chinese ceramics, and from medieval sculpture to objets de vertu — the French term for beautiful but useless things, like Fabergé.

“Dealers save their most important pieces for the Winter Antiques Show, so people know they are going to see things they wouldn’t see the rest of the year,” the show’s executive director, Catherine Sweeney Singer, said. “Dealers will say to a client: ‘I have a piece that I know you’re going to be interested in, but you need to come to the opening night party to see it.'” The party, sponsored by Elle Decor typically raises over a million dollars for the show’s owner, the East Side House Settlement. The work that goes into this big night is enormous and has to be carefully planned out by Ms. Singer and her staff. When a visitor stopped by the Armory yesterday afternoon, about 75 hours before the party, there were still trucks pulling in and out of the doors on Lexington Avenue, unloading antiques. The booths were built, but some were undecorated, and many objects were still boxed. At the booth of Peter Finer, an English dealer of arms and armor, a suit of armor was still lying on top of a trunk in pieces — a helmet, a torso, an arm — like a casualty of battle. The Winter Show takes a full week to install, beginning at midnight on the Thursday prior to the show. First, the show brings in its own electrical grid, because the Armory doesn’t have enough of a power grid to light the booths. On Friday morning, the contractor starts building the booths, which, on Saturday, are decorated according to the dealers’ specifications. (All of the dealers select their own wall coverings and moldings, while some have more elaborate, custom-designed booths.) Beginning on Monday morning, the dealers bring their trucks onto the floor one by one, on a carefully choreographed schedule, beginning with the dealers at the Park Avenue end of the drill room. Once they have loaded in, they spend whatever is left of Monday and Tuesday unpacking and arranging their booths. On Wednesday, the vetting occurs. There are around 150 vetters — mostly museum curators and outside dealers — divided into committees for the 26 different disciplines represented in the show. The vetters check for authenticity, accuracy of labeling, and quality. If dealers disagree with a ruling of the vetters, on Thursday they can bring appeals to a board that includes the committee, Ms. Singer, and the show’s chairman, Arie Kopelman. If a dealer has been asked to change a label and wishes not to, he must bring in new evidence to support his labeling. All of this rigor means that collectors know they are getting what the label says and what they are paying (substantial sums) for. And there is certainly plenty in the show to tempt buyers with deep pockets.

Yesterday afternoon, several of the booths were in a state of partial installation. Associated Artists, a dealer in furniture and fine art from the Aesthetic period, had erected in the center of their booth a large photo-mural: a blow-up of a room in William H. Vanderbilt’s New York mansion, which stood approximately where Rockefeller Center is now. The photograph established the provenance of one of the objects for sale in the booth: a delicate chair, resting on gilt hooves, that sits in the foreground.

At Barbara Israel Garden Antiques, a worker was touching up spots of rust on a large fountain, as garden nymphs looked on. Ms. Israel’s booth occupies the center spot in the show, because of its theatricality: The sculptures are arrayed against a mural depicting an Italian formal garden –– copied from an actual garden at a villa outside Milan.

Much about the setup of the Winter Show resembles the preparation for opening night of a play or an opera, Richard Philp, a dealer in medieval and renaissance sculpture observed. “There’s the construction of the sets, the buildup to the first night, the special costumes you wear, even a script,” he said. “You’re creating a fantasy.” And, of course, in the days preceding the opening, he said, there are also some meltdowns. “Now is the crazy part, the nervous breakdowns and sheer terror: ‘Oh, they haven’t sent the 14th-century virgin!’ Or someone’s head has been knocked off in transit.”

But by Thursday, all this will come together in a dazzling assembly of world-class antiques — the culmination of labor that began much longer ago than a week. The president of Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Stuart Feld, noted that he found almost all of the objects in his booth in different places. “I started thinking the other day about the tens of thousands of miles I’ve put on tracking these things down,” Mr. Feld said, “which I don’t think the public ever understands.”