The increasing use of finite element simulation in the field of composite material forming involved in the past few years a large among of research on the constitutive modelling of textile material at the mesoscopic scale (i.e. the scale of individual fibre tow). Up to now, a consensus does not exist on the most appropriate approach. The present contribution aims on the comparison between hypo-and hyper-elastic approaches to describe the mechanical behaviour of a single tow in the framework of nonlinear continuum mechanics. A particular attention is paid to the ease of implementation in standard finite element codes.