We Went Wedding Suit Shopping With Karl-Anthony Towns

“Game 5 was nothing,” the Knicks star says. “There’s more jitters for this.” Ahead of tying the knot in Malibu, KAT opened up about his love for Ralph Lauren, his reception playlist, and life after his first championship.Karl-Anthony Towns has been sleepier than usual lately. The seven-foot-tall Dominican power forward they call Big Purr has been taking a lot of, ahem, KAT naps over the last couple of months to keep up with what’s been a much busier offseason than he might have expected. As Towns puts it: “You don’t get no summer when you win.”KAT’s first summer wearing an NBA championship ring has been packed with appearances, parades, and everything else that comes with helping the New York Knicks win a title for the first time in 53 years. On this Monday morning in Beverly Hills, though, he’s days away from topping that feat with an even more significant ring: the one he’ll slip onto the finger of his longtime partner, Jordyn Woods.Towns and Woods tied the knot in Malibu last weekend, but at the top of the week, he was in a private room at the Ralph Lauren store on Rodeo Drive getting the last looks in for multiple fits he had planned for his wedding weekend. “Game 5 was nothing. I would say there's more jitters for this—and this is more guaranteed than Game 5,” KAT says with a laugh. “I know she’s going to say yes.”Still, KAT admits the wedding ceremony—specifically walking down the aisle past everyone he knows—is making him much more nervous than any postseason game, let alone the closeout for the NBA Finals. “It’s so weird to say… the only thing that makes me nervous is the walk,” he says. “Like, you run out of a tunnel with 20,000 people screaming at you; this is going to be 300 people watching you do this simple-ass walk. I don’t have to dunk a motherfucker, I don’t got to defend nobody. Just walk.”As much as KAT swears he wasn’t sweating the Finals, his unwavering focus on a Knicks victory meant trusting Jordyn to handle everything surrounding his wedding fits. “She got that style shit down to a T, honestly,” he gushes about his soon-to-be wife. His only stipulation was simply that it be in the Polo family. “Growing up in Piscataway, we didn’t really have designer brands, [but] when I would walk into Macy’s, Polo was prominent,” he says. “It represents where I came from and where I wanted to go.”Armed with the knowledge that Polo is KAT’s emotional common denominator, Jordyn locked in with Ralph Lauren and came back with a handful of Purple Label bangers for the Big Day. “She knows what I’m looking for, and how I’m trying to present it to the world… she knows me better than anyone,” he says.Knowing that KAT gravitates toward double-breasted suits, Jordyn landed on a double-breasted Italian wool barathea dinner jacket with peak satin lapels for the ceremony, paired with a white Sea Island cotton Aston pleated tuxedo shirt, black barathea tuxedo trousers, and a black silk bow tie. Standing in the full fit before the floor-length mirror in the Ralph Lauren back room, Towns looked equally ready to play Thomas Crowne as walk down the aisle.As much as Towns was anxious about the ceremony, he was looking forward to the reception. What was on his DJ request list? “Mac Miller for sure,” KAT says, name-checking the late rapper as his favorite artist. “If it was up to me, we’d be hearing a lot of Max B.” As far as new music goes, KAT shouts out Loe Shimmy and Drake’s triumphant return (“Last summer, we didn’t have Drake and it ain’t feel right”) before running down what else he’s been listening to lately. “Rome Streetz’ [new album] is great, Drake’s albums are amazing, but one album I think is so underrated is the Octane from Don Toliver,” Kat says, giving a wry shoutout to music talking head Anthony Fantano for calling it Don’s worst album earlier this year.After the wedding weekend, KAT knows it’ll be time to lock in for the 2026-27 season before long, wherein he and the rest of the Knicks will try to repeat the magic of this year’s win. Some players have said getting married and building a stable home life has sharpened their focus, but KAT doesn’t expect much to change either way. “I’ve always been able to compartmentalize my job and my outside life. When I'm at work, I'm at work,” he explains. “There’s nothing else in the world that matters to me but that basketball and that hoop and those four guys with me on the court. When I get off of work, I’m able to disengage from the competition and enjoy my personal life. It’s taken a lot of years for me to get really good at that. Work always used to dictate my emotions and my feelings and the way I felt about being outside of work. So being able to separate those two beings of myself and be able to be fully present for my fiancée, who is now going to be my wife, and for my family, my niece, my nephew, my sister, my dad, everyone in my support system.”KAT gets serious as he reflects on a point in his life when he thought he had to reverse-engineer some major development in his personal life to finally win that elusive championship trophy, and shares the internal monologue that’s been floating in his head for the last couple of years.“When I was getting closer and closer [to winning], I was like, maybe I gotta have a kid—they say when you have a kid, you get the dad superpower and then you become a different player. But if I could give any advice to anybody who's reading this: I always thought I was going to win a chip because I put the work in: I’m going to slave in the gym, I’m not going to think about anything other than basketball. Maybe I gotta give more and more and more to basketball. And I didn’t win. I didn’t win for a lot of years. And then when I started winning, I was like, I just got to find that extra one percent to give to basketball. When I got to the Western Conference Finals and we lost, then I came over here to the Eastern Conference Finals and we lost, I’m like, “Am I not giving enough to the game of basketball? I see my fiancée for two hours a day, then I’m in bed. Maybe I can [shorten that] to an hour, be more locked in.” This was the first year where I was like, “I’m going to put this in God’s hands. I’m going to work, of course, but I’m not going to stress about the things I can’t control.” We think our timing is the best timing. And as a man of faith, I really just put it in God’s timing, and then the first time I said, ‘I’ll win this when He tells me it’s my turn to win.’ And I won it the first time.”Even now, the Knicks’ run doesn’t always feel real. “I forget that we did it sometimes,” KAT admits while absent-mindedly running a finger over the Larry O’Brien chain jeweler Alex Moss made for him. “That’s just the competitor in me that's not allowing myself to get satisfied and to be stagnant. I’m looking for that next one. And I’m hungrier than ever to get the second one—I’ve said before, I’ll do anything to win that first one. If I was willing to do whatever it took to get the first one, what do you think I’m going to do for the second one?”Sign up for Show Notes to get news on the latest runway shows, parties, and insider events on the international fashion circuit.Frazier Tharpe is an editor at GQ specializing in dictating entertainment coverage and contributing via his Tap In column, where he weighs in on the pop culture conversation of the moment with his unique perspective. Frazier has written GQ cover stories on Beyoncé, Michael B Jordan and SZA, as well ... Read More