If you’ve ever gone hunting for vintage jeans and scored a pair of perfectly worn Levi's orange-tab jeans only to try them and realize they're cut for an altogether different era of body types, you're not alone. Owning vintage jeans is joy, but altering them is not. That’s where fashion veteran Sean Barron and entrepreneur Jamie Mazur (husband to a certain Victoria’s Secret Angel) decided they could be of help. Their label, Re/Done, takes vintage Levi’s 501s, recuts, and alters them for a right-for-right-now slim, slouchy fit. We paid a visit to the duo's downtown L.A. office and factory—where they alter anywhere from 6,000 to 8,000 pairs of jeans per month—to see how they revive some of the best pairs ever worn.

They don’t alter like a tailor.

Every pair of jeans that arrives at Re/Done is completely dismantled, save for the waistband and pockets, and then, once recut to fit the new pattern, is put back together to look the same as the jeans did when they started. Re/Done uses machines that date back to the ’40s in order to make sure the stitching and repairs don’t look out of place on the older fabric.

They source from all over the world.

“Sourcing from Levi’s would make our lives so much easier,” Barron told us, “but they don’t have the stock. We source jeans from all around the world. The vendors are more like traders from the old days—they live all over the place and trade common goods, essentially. It’s a whole network of interesting people with a lot of great stories to tell. We recently bought 25,000 pairs of jeans from one guy who was used to selling maybe 200 at a time.”