Garage Sale.(vendors at Garage collective in New York City's Chelsea district)

"I've been standing out here in my underwear for thirteen years," says Illisa, the preeminent vintage-lingerie vender at the GARAGE (112 W. 25th St.; 647-0707), the beloved weekends-only haunt in the heart of Chelsea's antiques and collectibles neighborhood. Though she's set up in a damp fluorescent-lit parking lot that can at best be described as dingy, Illisa's salmon-pink nighties and ethereal chemises ($60 to $125) are nothing if not pristine. On this damp spring afternoon, the dealer, who frequently works on plays and films--she has supplied several generations of "Cabaret" Kit Kat girls with tap pants--is wearing a tie-dyed bias-cut slip under a nineteen-thirties denim barn jacket. Illisa may deal exclusively in what used to be called unmentionables, but she has at least one thing in common with her fellow Garage dealers: she's as hopped up today about her wares as she was when she stepped into her first silk-chiffon teddy. "Actually, I get more excited about finding a really good nightgown now than I did when I started," she says, fondling a stack of prewar cotton stockings.

Around the corner from Illisa, Barbara Muccio, the proprietor of a business she calls Interesting Old Things, says, no, she hasn't been to Britain in a great many years, but, yes, lots of other people have told her that her collection of faux-tortoise loupes and sterling tea strainers, glass marbles and mid-century fountain pens, reminds them of an English antique seller's stall. "I just sell things that I resonate with--things that give me that aesthetic thrum," Muccio says. Particularly thrum-worthy is a heavily hallmarked, velvet-lined silver eyeglass case, monogrammed "TS" and dated 1928, that hails from Finland ...