The present work deals with the constitutive modelling and progressive failure analysis (PFA) of plain woven textile composites (PWTC). Two novel approaches, equivalent cross ply laminate (ECPL) coupled with classical laminate theory and Mori–Tanaka theory, are developed to compute homogenized properties of PWTC lamina. The PFA of PWTC lamina is performed coupling isotropic damage mechanics with ECPL theory, and meso-scale failure modes are identified. The novelty in the proposed PFA is that, the stress-based failure is detected, and the strain-based damage evolution is computed. A user-defined material subroutine of PFA of PWTC lamina is finally developed and test problems are solved in ABAQUS. All the simulation results of the proposed approaches are finally compared with experiments and found to be closely matching. © 2018