A ranked list of every dress at the Karl-Anthony Towns wedding was circulating within hours, Kylie Jenner in the top slot, captioned “discourse” and nothing else. I opened it assuming I’d missed an actual event, something with a score attached. I hadn’t. Somebody had just decided a wedding needed a leaderboard, and enough people agreed that it worked.
That’s the thing about athlete weddings: they get covered like award shows, guest list as red carpet, gown as headline, groom’s actual life reduced to a caption under somebody else’s outfit. Karl-Anthony Towns married Jordyn Woods in Malibu on August 15th, oceanfront, black tie, and the story that traveled fastest wasn’t the wedding. It was the room. The guest list did the rest of the work on its own: Kylie Jenner, Timothée Chalamet, Justin and Hailey Bieber, Michael B. Jordan, Teyana Taylor, Jada Pinkett Smith, Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor, plus a chunk of the Knicks locker room in Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart, and OG Anunoby, filling out a guest list that reads less like a wedding party and more like a seating chart at an event with its own PR team.
Woods wore a custom Danielle Frankel gown, Italian silk wool with hand-cut lace, the kind of dress that gets its own writeup independent of who was wearing it. Towns wore a black tuxedo, which is nearly the full extent of the coverage he got as an individual person getting married, as opposed to a Knicks champion who happened to be attending his own party.
Page Six’s version is close to the platonic ideal of this genre, guest list up top, arrivals tracked like a red carpet:
https://twitter.com/PageSix/status/2089078185040527399
I’m not annoyed at Page Six specifically. That’s the job, and the job works because we click. But it means the part of this story that actually explains anything, the part where two people who both buried a parent built a wedding ring out of that grief, got maybe a paragraph, somewhere below the ninth photo of Kylie’s dress.
Towns proposed on Christmas Eve, on the roof of a Manhattan cocktail bar called Overstory, and announced it the next morning with a caption that just said “Marry Christmas.” Cute, low-key, exactly the kind of detail that gets a line and moves on. The ring is where it stops being cute and starts being the actual story. It’s an emerald-cut diamond, custom through jeweler Bernard James, big enough that outlets stopped bothering to be precise about the carat count. Set into it: the birthstones of Towns’ mother, Jacqueline Cruz-Towns, who died in April 2020 after more than a month fighting COVID, and Woods’ father, John Woods, who died of cancer in January 2017 after the family had reconciled during his illness. Both stones sit beside Towns’ and Woods’ own birthstones, with a gradient of pink diamonds running down the band and an inscription in Spanish, a nod to his mother’s Dominican heritage.
I keep coming back to the fact that this isn’t a ring built around his loss with her along for the ride. It’s built around both of theirs, which is a stranger and better piece of design than “athlete honors late mother,” the version of this story that would’ve made every wire headline on its own and moved on by Thursday. Towns already put his mother on a trophy once, and the championship dedication was its own moment, separate from this one. What the ring does is fold Woods into that same grief instead of asking her to just witness his. That’s a specific choice two people made about how to carry two dead parents into a marriage, and it’s buried under captions about who wore what.
None of this makes the guest-list coverage some kind of failure. It’s just what we do with athlete weddings, the same reflex that turns a trade into fantasy points and a game into a highlight reel: find the part that’s easiest to rank, and rank it. Woods has spent this offseason building out her own brand independent of who she’s marrying, which makes her getting filed under “guest” at her own wedding feel almost funny, in a way I don’t think anyone intended.
Here’s a look at the day itself:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DcHUezjoCGO/
And Woods’ own post from the wedding:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DcJKKrGjKS5/
I don’t think there’s a villain here, unless you count the algorithm that decided a ranked dress list was worth building in the first place, or my roommate for sending it to me before I’d even seen the wedding photos. I just keep thinking about what it means that a ring built out of two people’s grief has to compete for attention with a scored list of outfits, and that right now, the ring is losing.
