Technically, one can use any valid sub name instead of new for the role of "create object" (i.e. blessing a hash with the module name), when writing an OOP module -- and can use sub new for some other function, confusing yes but it shows that name new is nothing special:

{   package MyObj;
    sub retro { bless { name => $_[1] }, $_[0] }
    sub string { join ', ', values %{ $_[0] } }
}

my $obj = MyObj->retro("aghag");
my $obj2 = retro MyObj("aaa"); # with the usual caveats
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