Some weddings are events; this one was a summit. When Jordyn Woods married Karl-Anthony Towns in Malibu in August, the guest list read like a red carpet, the bride wore a strapless gown with a lace-trimmed tulle veil, and — as Woods revealed on Today with Jenna & Sheinelle on Friday, Oct. 23 — the only crisis of the day involved that veil going missing. Here is everything we know about the celebration.
The Setting and the Ceremony
The couple exchanged vows in Malibu, California — they tied the knot on Aug. 15 — surrounded by family and friends. Woods, 29, described the ceremony itself as short and sweet, with the couple exchanging their vows privately. Within that intimacy, they built in a tribute: a chair in the family section for each of the two parents who could not be there — her father, John Woods, who died in 2017, and his mother, Jacqueline Cruz-Towns, who died in 2020 — dressed simply with flowers.
(TonyTheTiger / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0))The Dress, the Veil and the One Crisis
Woods walked the aisle in a white strapless gown with a full skirt, paired with a long tulle veil trimmed with lace. Towns, 30, wore a black tuxedo — double-breasted jacket, bow tie. The veil nearly stole the show for the wrong reason: it had not been packed, and was still back at the Airbnb when Woods arrived. “Everyone says I was the most chill bride they ever met. I wasn’t stressed about anything except the missing veil,” she recalled. A backup plan was in motion — a call to the dress designer, whose L.A. showroom could supply a replacement — before the original, fully custom veil was recovered in time. “It was such a pivotal part of the dress,” she said.
The Guest List
The star-studded label is earned. Attendees included some of Towns’ NBA teammates; Kylie Jenner with her boyfriend Timothée Chalamet; Hailey and Justin Bieber; Teyana Taylor; Michael B. Jordan; Jada Pinkett Smith; and Ben Stiller with Christine Taylor. It was a cross-section of the couple’s two worlds — the NBA and the fashion-and-entertainment circle Woods has built her career in — gathered on the Malibu coast.
(Cosmopolitan UK / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0))Two Months On
By the time Woods sat down with Jenna Bush Hager and Sheinelle Jones on Oct. 23, the wedding had settled into happy memory — and the questions had moved on to what comes next. Her answer made headlines of its own: she is “still not in the era of trying to get pregnant,” focused on her career and on the Knicks’ season, with family planned for “a perfect world” down the line. The hosts told her to take her time. Judging by the wedding she just pulled off — calm amid a missing-veil scramble, tender in its tributes, and glamorous without ever seeming staged — taking her time is exactly her style.
(Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net). / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0))The Road to Malibu
The wedding was the third act of a very public year. On Christmas Day last year, the couple announced their engagement in a joint Instagram post — Towns on one knee at Overstory, a rooftop bar in New York City, Woods’ emerald-cut diamond ring front and center, and a caption that doubled as a holiday card: “Marry Christmas.” In July, they walked the red carpet together at the 2026 ESPY Awards at Lincoln Center. By August, the celebration had moved to the California coast, where the guest list blended Towns’ basketball world with Woods’ fashion-and-entertainment circle.
What guests saw was a ceremony designed with restraint: short and sweet, vows exchanged privately rather than performed, and the emotion carried by details instead of spectacle. The two flower-dressed chairs said more than a tribute video could have — a recognition that both the bride and the groom had lost a parent before this day, hers in 2017 and his in 2020, and that joy and grief were always going to share the room. Woods spoke about the tributes on Today with the same steadiness she brought to the missing-veil story, as if the wedding’s philosophy could be summed up in her own words about the day: relaxed, personal, and exactly as planned — even the parts that weren’t.
The Looks, Revisited
Fashion mattered here, and not only because the bride is a designer. Woods’ gown — strapless, white, full-skirted — was classic bridal, and the veil was its signature: long tulle, lace-trimmed, and custom-made, which is precisely why its brief disappearance qualified as the day’s one emergency. Towns matched the formality in a black tuxedo with a double-breasted jacket and bow tie. Together the looks photographed like a magazine cover and read, on Woods’ telling, like a couple who had simply dressed as themselves, only more so.
Why This Wedding Resonated
Celebrity weddings usually generate one kind of coverage: the dress, the guests, the cost. Woods and Towns generated a second kind — admiration for the tone. A bride unbothered by anything but a missing veil; a ceremony kept short and sweet inside a star-studded afternoon; private vows in a public life; two chairs of flowers doing the emotional work. When Woods retold it all on Today on Oct. 23 — and then, in the same breath, declined to rush into parenthood — the through-line was obvious. This was not a wedding performed for an audience. It was a marriage starting the way the relationship did: as friendship, conducted at its own pace, with the famous friends simply along as witnesses.