Board-Certified in Denim

His bedside manner isn’t great: He would rather listen to bluegrass than chitchat, but this doctor’s practice is bursting at the seams. Meet Dr. Blue Jeanns, a.k.a. Sherman Oaks tailor Tony Pacheco, surgeon to your favorite vintage Levi’s and those $200 designer jeans that are the fashion uniform of the moment.

Pacheco’s clients drive out from all over Los Angeles and as far north as Ventura and have shipped jeans from New York and Tennessee for procedures such as the “reattachment,” a repair that restores the original hemline. Another favorite is the “debubble,” in which Pacheco alters pudge-induced bulges in the inside thigh line to restore that horseshoe shape we all deserve.

He’s treated plenty of celebrity denim over the years, but he doesn’t care about fame. “Jeans are for everyone,” says Pacheco, who started out in Studio City in 1975, moving to his current location 12 years ago. But lately the boom in high-priced status jeans has business so brisk he’s taking in 40 pairs and up a day. Another factor is the trend for vintage Levi’s, which can go for $1,000 a pair and tend to need tailoring. “Customers say they buy them because they fit so well,” he says. “But they really don’t.”

A San Fernando Valley native, Pacheco took night classes in custom tailoring while working for 7-Up. In those days he was doing colorful inserts to make bell-bottoms even larger. “It was the Sonny and Cher influence,” Pacheco says. In the ‘80s “it was Jordache.” The fit was tight, the leg was super-narrow and nobody would touch a pair of Levi’s. But at 62, he knows about changing times. “I grew up right here and I remember when this used to be a cornfield with a gas station on the corner,” he says of his busy strip-mall location off Ventura Boulevard. “Jeans, like everything, have a cycle.”